theme verse :: “Peter got up, ran to the tomb; stopping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.” (Luke 24:12)

Rhythm is simply defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound. Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” comes to mind. Rhythm denotes a repeatable pattern and, consistently experienced enough, forms a sustainable base upon which any great song can be built. The Christian song is one of resurrection upon which every other layer of music in our life is built. How is your life adding to this great resurrection song? Thomas Merton writes, “Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat... Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully for that." Let every hindrance fall away. Be amazed. Clear your lungs. Breathe deeply. And SING! Christ is risen!

Luke 19:28-40But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.6 Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

The rhythm is gonna get you! Can’t avoid it today. The Easter jam is too exhilarating! Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine made that song, “The Rhythm is Going to Get You,” famous in 1987. It was written, maybe not surprisingly at all, by the band’s drummer, Enrique Garcia. Who knows more about rhythm than the drummer of Miami’s Sound Machine? Just last year, the song was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, and artistically significant.”[1] Touche. Rhythm is contagious for sure and Gloria Estefan’s voice can easily get stuck in your head. Rhythm is simply defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound. It denotes a repeatable pattern and, consistently experienced enough, forms a sustainable base upon which any great song can be built. The rhythm often makes the song. It’s something we can feel. When we were teens, if there was a song that didn’t have the best message but we still liked listening to it, that was our excuse: “We just like the beat.” “We just like the rhythm.” And my grandma would say, “Don’t let that rhythm getcha Markie!” Grandma… I’ve. Been. Gotten.

We’ve been living in the Sacred Rhythms of the spiritual life the last forty days leading us to this Easter moment. Our song today is one of resurrection… a rhythm of our faith upon which every other layer of our life-song is built. Today, as we celebrate the rise of life over death, I ask a simple question for you to consider: How is your life adding to this great resurrection song? We get all spiffy’d up to be here today… might as well see if we’ve got any Easter rhythm in us. Is there any punch to Easter still or is it mostly pomp and circumstance? I resonated with a guy who once said, “I want to do great things for God.” It was such a noble desire and Easter had him all pumped up. I thought, “I want to do great things for God too.” Something flipped a switch for him, however, that helped me re-calibrate the rhythm of my life too. He said, “That idea had too much to do with me. ‘I’ was what was on stage… as if ‘I’ was doing God some big heroic favor.” He shifted the idea to “I want to simply do things for a great God.” God will take care of the greatness of anything. I just have to do the next faithful thing. This was about finding true purpose in the little things every day… not some grandiose operation that makes a hero out of me. Just things that point to a great God… that bring some healing to the world, that validate the worth of someone who’s been de-valued. It was steady and faithful; even doable. It’s like the old spiritual sage Thomas Merton’s quote: “Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat… Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully for that.” What are you living for? What’s getting in the way of that? Where is your rhythm?

Easter is as good a time as any to ask these questions. The story is familiar. After the terrible mess of Friday’s crucifixion, all pretty much sat in ruins. Someone recently said, “Nothing ruins your Friday like realizing its Wednesday.” But this particular Friday we’ve come to call Good, sort of ruined a whole lot of things – killed a man who was armed with nothing but a basin, a towel, and grace; killed a movement; broke a mother’s heart. It was a dark deal no doubt about it. Most of us can relate to Good Friday. We’ve had the loss. We’ve had a dream or an idea or a life-direction murdered. Any grueling heartbreak will give you the feels of Good Friday.

Silent Saturday followed… sometimes more numbing the day after than the day of the great demise itself. Have you sat in such a space? You haven’t showered. Your teeth have sort of fuzzed over. Your gaze is glossy… maybe staring out the window in the front room… seeing life moving on for others when yours clearly halted abruptly the day before. People try. They’ll ask you something. Mumble a trying word about “your loss,” maybe even leave a frozen casserole with a note about pre-heating the oven to 350 degrees and baking for sixty minutes. It’s all a blur really.

Sunday rolls around… nothing sacred there… unless you’re a group of committed Jewish women who have honored Saturday’s Sabbath and have taken first chance to head to the tomb of their beloved son, leader, friend. It’s the women who need to be thanked for giving us Easter. Jesus did his part, of course, but it was the women who ventured to the tomb in their grief and fear and uncertainty. The four Gospels in the Bible all tell the resurrection account a little differently but every one of them gets the women to the tomb first; a culturally stunning reality given the oppression of women in that time and even now.

I saw this all-too-true cartoon this week that demonstrated this very thing.

It said, “So ladies, thanks for being the first to witness and report the resurrection and… we’ll take it from here.” It is the women who have long, and still, been the backbone of the movement; whose voices and visions and witness should also lead us forward. As Luke tells us, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary (Jesus’ mother) and ‘the other’ women find the tomb empty which mostly compounds the feelings they’re already sorting through.

Suddenly, a couple of guys in Easter pastels with night-running head lamps on show up and say, “Whatcha lookin’ for?” They tell the women that Jesus has checked out of the tomb after enjoying the “free hot breakfast.” It’s just like he intended all along. There’s understandable confusion. The angels go on: “Remember that time when you were back in Galilee and Jesus was teaching and he told that funny story about he and his brother James getting locked out of the family station wagon after the Zeppelin concert?” They nod… it was an epic story. “And do you remember, then, when he said how he was going to be handed over to sinners, killed on a cross, and in three days rise up? You remember that?” “Oh yeah,” they said. And while I’m sure this was an insanely crazy moment of profound amazement and wonder and skepticism yet optimism and a thousand questions and with all sorts of noise and spices being kicked over and the like, the text simply reports rather stoically, “Then they remembered Jesus’ words.” Come on, Luke, we want the deets, man.

The details make a difference, right? We love the details. That’s where we connect. That’s how we relate. That’s how we truly get to know each other and even know Jesus. Religion is a thing that can get in the way. We can see religion and touch it and try to master it… but it’s not the same. Over a billion dollars has been raised to reconstruct the Cathedral of Notre Dame which is an amazing thing coming out of a very tragic event. Lots of pictures of the gold cross still hanging amidst the rubble of the cathedral. It’s a powerful image. We’re drawn to it because we can touch it, feel it, smell the smoldering piles of pews beneath it. I’m for its inspiring beauty and symbol of hope and new life. But I also know it’s just a building.

There’s a series of comic strips called “Coffee with Jesus.”[2] Great stuff. Always makes me smile, think a bit, convict my own motives sometimes. There was this one that shows Jesus having a coffee conversation with a man named Kevin. While it’s floating around again, it was originally from 2011 so the references are a little dated but I think you’ll get the point.

Man says, “It’s that time of year when we all make our top ten lists, Jesus. So, let’s hear one from you. Give us your top ten most important events of 2011.” Jesus says, “Well, number ten would have to be when this little girl in the rural reaches of Jilin Province in China gave her last apple to a very hungry old woman.” Man responds, “Yeah, that’s not really how this works, Jesus. You pick a world story or maybe a celebrity screw-up. Like Iran or Charlie Sheen.” Jesus says, “You’ve got your important events, Kevin, and I’ve got mine. Number nine: a single mother of three in Mexico adopted the daughter of her dying neighbor…”.

Religion has its value… I’m down with it…I’m swimming in it, right? But I also recognize religion isn’t ultimately the thing we’re after. We’re after the details we uncover in relationship. It’s why you have that knowing look with your best friend, your spouse, or that person who’s been through it all with you. You know the details… the back story… the ups and downs. That’s the rhythm – the bass line – that you’re building your life-song on. While we get a little shorted on the details here, I’m so thankful for the details we do have that guide us into a deeper relationship with this risen Jesus.

Following the reaction, as dramatic or even keeled as it may have been, the women high tail it back to the makeshift ‘Jesus movement’ office where Peter and the other disciples were still in a fog. Breathless, but in the best kind of way, the women told the other disciples what they had experienced. Luke says, “they kept telling these things to the apostles” but the apostles didn’t believe a word. Before we dog the guys out too much here, let’s trust that all of us would find the whole thing a bit unfathomable. And… they were grieving and shocked and exhausted too. Peter, who always acts before he thinks things through, does what many of us may have been inclined to do: lace ‘em up and get to running to the tomb ourselves. The others stayed behind presumably. They probably huddled around a couple of different televisions – half the group were Fox News guys and the others MSNBC. Surely there was some local coverage by now. Pete’s running… man… the endorphins that bounce around your brain when you run are incredible. His thoughts are flashing back through all of the highlights… when he first met Jesus, skeptical as any. The time he walked on water to meet Jesus (more thrilling than bungy jumping). The guard’s ear Peter lopped off when he tried to arrest Jesus… and Jesus putting that ear right back in place. The first time Peter told Jesus, “I believe you’re the Messiah.” The time he told Jesus he’d never betray him… and the three times he came up short, betraying his best friend. The spiraling out of control events of Friday and now… this.

If you’ve given Jesus much time in your life, your story may have similar ups and downs. Seasons when you’ve been in-it-to-win-it, so deeply committed, faithful. Times you served others in need, stood up for the oppressed, served on the tech team at the church. But there were seasons when you let that relationship drift… you were doing you, building an empire or really got into that one hobby that seemed to sort of take over much of your time and, you know, hobbies aren’t a bad thing but they can cause a drift. Maybe you weren’t feeling churchy or your questions felt ignored or that one thing happened and it soured you to the religious stuff. Whatever the case, we may call Peter ‘Saint’ today but he was just a guy trying to figure it out… wanting to do something meaningful with his life… believing he had discovered something real and genuine in Jesus. Someone once said, “The superheroes you have in your mind are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized one or two strengths.”

Peter gets there… the guys in the dazzling prom tuxedoes were now gone. It’s just Peter and the tomb. Never bashful, he barrels his way into the tomb… pulls out his smart phone and finally gets his thumb swiped just right to get his flashlight app to stay on so he can see. Nothing there. Just some grave clothes. “Boss?” Pete whispers. “Jesus. You here?” Nothing but the crickets out front and the fragrance of lilies… maybe a little muffled Lauren Daigle, “You’re Still Rolling Stones” in the earbuds that were dangling down the front of his shirt. “And Peter walks away puzzled, shaking his head in amazement.” It’s such an epic deal here, my friends. I don’t pretend to grasp it all myself. But I, too, am stunned in amazement. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says,

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

That’s the Easter jam. That’s the sacred rhythm… built on resurrection amazement. But what’s the lasting impact? Someone said very bluntly one time and I’ve adjusted some language because people can get worked up about that sort of thing but he said, “If you see your glass as half-empty, pour it into a smaller glass and quit complaining.” This Easter thing… this invitation to new life in Christ… the grace that turns all that seems like loss and death to wins and life… sets the tone for the rest of our lives. It’s beyond comprehensible description; an overflowing cup no matter the size of container we try to hold it in.

Last Sunday, David Brock, one of our elders stood at the Table to invite us to share our offerings for the day. He stood right there, looked over at me and said to all of you, “I wonder what would happen if Mark stood up in the pulpit and simply said, “I got nothin’!” We all laughed but I was thinking… “You don’t know how many times we’ve been that close, buddy.” Sometimes I really just want to say, “Friends, if cauliflower can somehow become pizza crust, anything is possible.” Truth is, today is sort of a “I got nothin’” sort of Sunday. I’m tempted to give you some theological discourse on the preposterous yet undisputable proof of the great Easter mystery. I’d love to think that something I would say today would push somebody over the edge of disbelief to faith; get that email that says, “You know, pastor, before Easter Sunday, I was not having any of it… but that thing you said, that proof you gave, that amazing illustration about the drummer of the Miami Sound Machine knowing so much about rhythm just set it off for me. I wasn’t in before but I’m in now.” Rhythm is gonna get you! Every minister’s dream, you know? But the honest truth? I got nothin’.

Renegade pastor and public theologian, Nadia Bolz-Weber tweeted out this week what she does every year saying,

“Clergy and church workers – here’s your yearly reminder: Jesus will rise from the dead even if you forgot to print out the right hymns, even if the lilies arrive already wilted, even if the whole choir gets food poisoning… [even if you get into the pulpit and you got nothin! we might add,] Nothing will keep the stone from rolling away.”

Thank God for that. And the reality is, it’s up to you what you do with Easter from here. Peter, peering into the tomb to see for himself what the women had already witnessed and proclaimed, simply “went home,” the text says, “amazed at what had happened.” We may do some of that today. After the ham and the deviled eggs and jello molds and a nap and the Thunder playoff game, we may say, “How ‘bout that music? Amazing.” Or “Did you see so and so there? Nice to see the kids were home.” Or… “Resurrection, huh. That’s interesting.” Going home amazed is part of the Easter story. But what really matters is what happens the next day.Rhythm is a strong, regular, repeatedpattern of movement. The sacred rhythm of Easter is strong… and when repeated in our daily lives… it changes the world. That’s what’s truly amazing. So even when I’ve got nothin’… we’ve got all that ever really matters.

theme verse :: “For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:15)

Any musician will tell you that honoring the ‘rests' are just as important as playing the ‘notes.’ Even so, we are culturally all about the notes and much less interested in the rests. The disciples, ready to party for the Passover and equally ready to act on Jesus’ next move to kingship were taken aback when Jesus essentially says, “Let’s start with the rest.” Amidst betrayal and greed and ignorance, Jesus chooses to serve and suggests we do the same.

John 13:1-20Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. 18 I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But it is to fulfill the scripture, ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’ 19 I tell you this now, before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am he. 20 Very truly, I tell you, whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”

And there is a light… don’t let it go out. What an ending, eh? That Bono knows how to leave you hanging. This “Song for Someone” was released to the world in 2015.[1] Bono’s little band called U2 gave us this gift. He mentioned it was initially a song for his wife – childhood sweetheart named Ali whom he later married and has been married to ever since. What a world that opened before them? Bono told Rolling Stone, “Before I even knew what commitment was, I ended up as a young man in the arms of this young woman, in a world somewhat hostile to the concept of the childhood sweetheart and a first love.”[2] He went on to say, “This Song for Someone is about first journeys.” It became a song for anyone trying to find their way. For a lyric describing a childhood existence, there’s certainly some depth there. Some pain… that perhaps he could only imagine from the distance of decades. Did you hear it? “You got a face not spoiled by beauty… I have some scars from where I’ve been. I don’t know how these cuts heal… but in you I found a rhyme.” First journeys, it turns out, tend to happen over and over again in our lives. Pain, especially, is something… even when we think we’re numb to it from bearing so much of it… comes back with a fury … almost like it’s new every time.

Listen… for a moment… to this excerpt from Rob Bell’s Drops Like Stars. It’s a bit of a trip but see if you can’t hold the ups and downs of first journeys that are more repeatable than we might think.

“In 1941, in a village in Nazi-controlled Poland, a young man came home to discover that his father had died while he was at work. What made his father’s death exceedingly more unbearable was that several years earlier, both this young man’s sister and mother had died. As he held his father’s dead body in his arms, he lamented, “I’m all alone. At twenty, I’ve already lost all the people I’ve loved.” One writer described it like this: “Ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God. But it didn’t come without tears, and it didn’t come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror.” Suffering can do that to us. We’re jolted, kicked, prodded, and shoved into new realities we never would have brought about on our own. We’re forced to imagine a new future because the one we were planning on is gone. The key word here is, of course, “imagine.” That young Polish man sitting on the floor with his dead father in his arms was having all of his boxes smashed to pieces. “His life could no longer be what it used to be.”

Rob then makes a seemingly random transition. Play along…

Now for a multiple-choice question: If we went to a performing arts center on a Saturday night and as we walked in we noticed that everybody was dressed up and backstage there were various performers pacing back and forth in tights and slippers and they had Russian last names, we would know we were at:

The rodeo

An insurance convention

The grand opening of a new hair salon

The ballet

The location and time and clothes of this event are what art theorists call “insulators.” Insulators frame an event, providing context and helping determine the meaning of an experience for us. If we went to the ballet and everybody in the audience was wearing snorkels or the musicians were all red-haired banjo players with no teeth or instead of being handed a program we were handed a squirrel, we would immediately begin asking, “What is this?” But our real question would be, “Where is this? Where do we put this? How do we place it?” Because our standard reference points—the usual insulators – wouldn’t be there to guide us. That’s often what happens when we suffer. We had things well planned out. We knew what meant what. We had all of our boxes properly organized and labeled. But all of that was disrupted when we began to suffer. So there’s “out of the box,” which is often merely a variation of the same thing. And then there are those who think and feel and live and create from a different place. They’ve had their boxes smashed and their insulators dismantled until they had no other option but to imagine a totally new tomorrow.

We could call this the art of disruption. [a life defining shifter]

… that young Polish man? His name was Karol Jozef Wojtyla, but later in life he was known as Pope John Paul II.

Things change. Insulators implode. Life shifts. Then Rob quotes Catherine of Aragon who said, “None get to God but through trouble.”[3]

Huh. All the pain… the scrappy nature of the human journey. The firsts, the middles, the repeat offenders, the endings. This is a Song for Someone. Maybe it’s a song for you tonight. This Table stuff? Maybe not your first time… but maybe worth coming as if for the first time again. It is probably the first time today… maybe in a while. Maybe since that new pain hit. That new loss. That new sense of darkness. Something’s always happening to disrupt the rhythm.

This was no doubt the case that first/last Passover gift of what we’ve come to know as sacred and standard. John’s Gospel account gives us the disruption more than the meal. The gathering… the Passover… the meal and celebration… and yet the lingering knowing of Jesus that things were going to be different and more quickly than any of them had clue. He was about to hand his disciples a squirrel. The meal was presumably going as planned. The people were there. The food hit all the menu requirements. The respite from the road a welcomed pause. The energy of Jesus’ recent entry to Jerusalem still ripe with the flow of adrenaline. In it all, however, something wasn’t sitting right in Jesus’ own spirit. Luke’s gospel notes there’s a little dispute at this meal about “Who is the greatest among the disciples.” Seven-year old’s ask this question sometimes: “Who do you think is the best player on our baseball team, dad?” John doesn’t mention this piece but perhaps it was hanging as a bit of a cloud over the gathering as far as Jesus was concerned. And… the fact that Jesus gets up during dinner to wash the feet of his disciples suggests that the team may have all been too proud to set up the water basin and towel so that all could wash their feet when they entered the room.

Standard practice before dinner was the washing of the feet. The Palestinian roads were unsurfaced and uncleaned. In dry weather it was inches deep in dust and in wet weather it was liquid mud.[4] Feet are more purposeful than beautiful anyway so washing the dirty feet of your peers was kind of a chore. Wealthy parties had servants for that job but this crew with Jesus likely couldn’t afford such a service. It probably fell among them as a task of taking turns. My kids like cuddling with our dog but they scatter quickly when it’s time to take her out to use the restroom. Given the rise of attention on Palm Sunday and these questions about greatness, the job of washing the feet before dinner may have seemed beneath them.

So, sitting at dinner with dirty feet, arguing about who is the greatest, and who knows what else, Jesus knows this is a moment that can’t be ignored. What transpires is perhaps the most profound leadership teaching that Jesus ever offers. What do you do when you realize you’re the most powerful person in the room? You serve. Jesus pushes back from the table while the rest are carrying on. He grabs a bucket, fills it with warm water and pulls the “Happy Passover” dish towel that was hanging on the stove handle. He rolls up his sleeves, gets down on his knees and starts washing feet without saying a word. The table gets quiet. There are confused faces. It gets a bit awkward to be honest. Jesus silently washes the muck off the feet of a couple of his disciples, dries between their toes and rubs their feet dry with the towel, squeezes them gently maybe offering a short blessing and moves on to the next.

Peter, as vocal and stubborn as any of the team, is about third in line. He ain’t comfortable with this at all. Jesus gets to him and Pete breaks the silence by asking Rob Bell’s question: “Whoa. Hold up there, Teach. What is this?” Peter’s grabbed that “Happy Passover” towel out of Jesus’ hands to get Jesus to look at him. “This is silly, Jesus. I’m sorry that we flaked out on the feet washing job tonight. That’s our bad. Andrew? It was your turn, Bro. Whatever the case, I’m sorry we didn’t get it done but you’re just being ridiculous now.” But Jesus, as if to say, “You miss this lesson and you miss the whole thing,” says, “Peter… you either let me do this or there’s no place for you in the future movement.” If you can’t learn to serve humbly like this, you’ll never fully grasp the thrust of the message. Peter relents but he’s not happy about it. And the pain of the silence as Jesus goes one by one… no sound in the room except the splash of the water and the pat of the towel.

This is it. The disruption of service. And when Jesus is done, sweat on his brow from the hard work, fingers wrinkled from soaking in too much dirty water, he stands and says, “Do you get it now? Do you see what I’ve done?This is a song for someone in this room who will never forget this moment. This is a song for someone who’s too proud to serve like that. This is a song for someone who’s worried about being the greatest. Greatness is found only in this way. Get it wrong and everything else will start going to your head. I’ve set the example. Go and do likewise.”

That’s one way to put a damper on an otherwise fun dinner party. But such is the case of first journeys. Every moment with Jesus was new… a renewal of an old practice… a shift of some tradition to turn it on its head. The question moves from “What is this?” to “Where is this? Where do we put this? How do we place it?” It makes no sense. And… we’re always trying to figure this out. Paul was the one who gave us that vulnerable and all too honest line, “Why do I always do the very thing I don’t want to do. I do the thing I hate and I can’t seem to do the very thing I want to do.” And here we sit in such a similar state… repeat offenders wondering if we can journey again as if for the first time.

I have a high school classmate who I haven’t spoken to since high school, but we became Facebook friends a number of years ago. We hung out a few times in Middle School but not really after that. Even so, went to a small school in a small town so you know everybody and I generally counted everyone a friend. I’ll call him Rico… not his real name… but if you’re gonna make up a name, might as well be a cool name like Rico. Rico’s little brother died when we were in Middle School. He went missing for a while and was later found in an abandoned well on their farm. It was so sad. Rico was a bit of a bully on into high school… maybe had a bit of a chip on his shoulder as I could understand. He was a little guy but talked big. He became a father as a teen himself and via his posts, I’ve learned he became a grandfather by his mid-30’s. Rico posted recently a “Rest in Peace” message, naming his sister who apparently passed a few years ago – she was several years younger than us. Rico has had some trouble with the law and has maybe been a bit of an over-poster on social media but he puts it right out there: issues he’s got with other people; job’s he’s started, lost, started again. He’s ranted and asked for forgiveness. He’s declared fresh starts and repeat attempts at giving up nicotine. He’s been up and down with posts about faith… starting over… hoping anew … declaring trust in Jesus as Savior… “This time for real!” he’ll say.

He’s posted many scripture verses this week… longing for the truth of this week to settle in the world. And I just long for his heart. He’s been through a lot… many fits and restarts and mistakes… some beautiful; others with wounds that still gape wide open. I believe, in the depths of his soul, he’s good. He’s got a desire for God. And he’s been burned and rejected time and time again. This night is a song for Rico. It’s a song for someone here too. Bono says it this way: “I’m a long way from your hill of Calvary… and I’m a long way from where I was and where I need to be…”. If that’s you tonight? This is a song for you. If you could journey again… as if this was your first communion experience… how would you approach it? How would it feel? How would it taste? Would you pray? What would you say to Jesus? If you felt him kneel, slide off your shoes and holy socks and washed your feet, how would it change your heart? …

Where have you been since you’ve last been at this Table? What miles have you run? What struggle have you endured. What loss has you reeling? What sin has your gut churning?

We watched alongside the world, the Cathedral of Notre Dame go up in flames on Monday… that spire, with cross that pierced the sky, tumbled down on top of itself. Rico posted about it… “a sign of the times,” he said. What are we do to with this? Where do we place this? Another colleague posted this: “All who are saddened by Notre Dame should make a pilgrimage to their own house of worship… Please thank those who have cared for it, adorned it, left legacy in it.” Then he quoted Fred Craddock, the humble preacher, who said, “A plain, cinder block two-room country church, with a concrete floor and hardwood benches, is a heavenly palace where angels reside when you bring and receive the love of Jesus every week.”

What are you bringing into this moment? What are you willing to take out of this moment? There is suffering, yes. There is sadness and grief, yes. There is trial and error and trial again, yes. And there is betrayal. But… the invitation Bono offers to his beloved in this song for someone may be one we offer Christ tonight: “You let me into a conversation; a conversation only we could make. You break and enter my imagination… whatever’s in there it’s yours to take. I was told I’d feel nothing the first time… but this could be the night.”

I want to tell you a secret. You’re in on something tonight that most are missing. They maybe don’t mean to miss out. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they just don’t know. When you told them you were going to a Maundy Thursday service tonight, they responded, “Is that like Taco Tuesday?” Or maybe you didn’t tell anybody at all. But since you came, I hope you know this song for someone? It’s for you. This could be the night. May you receive the grace of Christ as if for the very first time.

"Discernment is truly a gift from God, but not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge.”(Ernest Larkin). There was a lot of discernment going on that first “Palm Sunday.” Everyone close to the Jesus movement knew a big moment was in front of them. Were they ready? Were they committed? If they watched the ‘game film’ of the Palm Parade on Tuesday, would they have wondered if they should have gone about the whole thing differently? The discernment of Jesus was clear. The question for us? Will we cheer or will we curse? How will we recognize and respond to the presence of God?

Luke 19:28-40 After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” 32 So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 They said, “The Lord needs it.” 35 Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. 37 As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, 38 saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” 39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Time is a funny and amazing thing. We often wonder if we have enough of it; what we’ll do with the time we actually do have; and if we’ve wasted too much of it on things that don’t matter. Our instant society hasn’t helped much with this matter of time. We’re attached to our devices and have allowed them to serve as our brains for the most part. And what once seemed like a speedy booting up of our internet access with that crazy AOL sound that was made when it was launching now has us laughing at the thought of its lag… and, we’re more frustrated than ever if our high-speed internet isn’t firing on all cylinders. What we certainly don’t have time for is getting locked out of our devices. The agony! You get, what, like three chances to input the right password to unlock most devices before it goes on full lock down assuming your device has been stolen. Every wrong entry generally means a longer time you have to wait before you can try the password again. If I mess up the first two times, I’m uber careful about getting the right combo or letters and numbers into that box to avoid the lock-out. We don’t have time for a lock-out! You can imagine, then, the agony Evan Osnos experienced this week when he discovered he was locked out of his iPad. His three-year-old son had unknowingly (or was it?) typed in wrong combos of letters and numbers an unfathomable about of times. When his dad picked up his iPad to use it, he discovered the horrifying message saying that his device was disabled. Here’s the kicker. It read“Try again in 25,536,442 minutes.” That means Osnos’ iPad will not be unlockable until the year 2067.[1] Tweeting for help on another device, he got responses like, “Time travel seems to be your best bet.” Another suggested he “reboot his 3-year-old.” Osnos has obtained the attention of the people at Apple and they’re trying to help him though he may not be able to retrieve all of his data. The option of waiting, 48 years, however, is something, he says, “I’m just not willing to do.” Can you blame him?

Spending time. Wasting time. Not giving the time of day to that thing or that other request or that purpose that is just not your calling anymore. What are you doing with your time? Are you stuck in the past? Are you forever daydreaming about the future? Is the present moment paralyzing or are you ready to act, move, do that thing, live that purpose, finally force the issue?

It’s Palm Sunday, my friends. A point in this sacred season of Lent where time is on our minds for all is set in motion… Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, even Easter, loom closely on the horizon… but none of it is set in motion without the triumphal entry of Jesus into the city of Jerusalem which we recognize today. It was time. In three years of ministry, Jesus is oft to say, “It’s not yet the time…” and “Don’t talk about this widely just yet…” but today signifies the Palm Sunday password was the entry to a whole new reality. And Jesus, while peacefully done, forces the issue that has every party asking, “Is this the time?” And it was. It was time for Jesus. It was time for those who were ready to pounce on Jesus. All was coming together. It was Passover time, of course, so the city was buzzing with activity as people were making all of the arrangements for their celebrations. Jesus had discerned this was the time indeed.

As our Sacred Rhythms series is nearing its climax, we’re considering the gift of discernment today; thinking about timing and choices and decisions. Ernest Larkin says “Discernment is truly a gift from God, but not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge.” Discernment becomes a habit – a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life. Honed and practiced, we begin to develop an intuitive sense of God’s heart. Ruth Haley Barton calls this ‘becoming familiar with God’s voice – the tone, quality and content – just as we become familiar with the voice of a human being we know well. [In that recognition], we are able to grasp the answers to several key questions: “Who is God for me in the moment? Where is God at work, continuing to unfold his love and redemption? Who am I most authentically in response?”[2] Jesus has never been locked out of his access to the very heart of God. Never. They are One. And he longs for that Oneness for all of us too. Discernment is that quest, to the best of our imperfect abilities, to be at One with the heart of God – in our decisions and in our relationships. We would do well to ask Barton’s three questions as we move about the world. Jesus has discerned that the movement is now and thus embarks the events that make Palm Sunday, Palm Sunday before it ever had a title.

In fact, the day would have been more like our Monday’s than anything else. Sunday was not the Sabbath or holy day like Sunday is for us. The Sabbath, for our Jewish friends, is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. So their Sunday would be more like a Monday-ish kind of day… Just another manic Monday, right? We even use the day as a downer saying, “Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays,” which means you’re grumpy. And people are grumpy on Mondays. I was driving my daughter to school last Monday and there’s construction on the only road into the school and so people were having to merge into one lane. It was ironic that this SUV in front of me had this huge sticker on the back glass. It was a huge cross that had the words above it, “Jesus Saves.” It was like such a big statement. But that SUV refused to let anyone merge in front of them. The sticker may have more accurately said: “Jesus saves but I ain’t Jesus and you ain’t mergin.” Not the greatest witness, you know? Anyway… Monday’s, as the first day of the work week, symbolize the business of life continuing – life moving forward, getting back at the routine. The Monday drag. “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” sang the Carpenters. Now the Type-A personalities are all down for Mondays – a day to attack whatever needs to be done. Get things cranked up again. Whatever the case… and it would be a bit different with the Passover celebration coming that week… but Jesus perches himself at the mountain of Olives and sets the plan in motion – sending two of the disciples into the village to pick up a colt for his entry to the city. His instruction to them, should anybody be suspicious of their nabbing of this colt, is to simply say, “The Lord needs it.” That’s a password that I would think gets you locked out of most places. When’s the last time you’ve tried it? But, as far as the text itself goes, we have no hesitation from the disciples that this isn’t a good plan. Their discernment is grounded in this trust of Jesus to be who he says he is and he hasn’t let them down yet.

Trust can’t be forced. Discernment can’t be forced. It is always a gift. We can learn to find ways of opening ourselves to it. There’s no formula or method but it’s a way of being with a decision in God’s presence and allowing God to guide our knowing. Barton suggests there are three crucial beliefs in the practice of discernment. The first is belief in the goodness of God. May seem like a straight-outta-Sunday-School-lesson but let’s be honest, many of us have trouble really believing in the goodness of God when it comes to our personal decisions. Generally, sure. God is good. For you? Of course. For your stuff? God is great. Just trust. But my stuff? Ooo… not so sure… making that leap, having what Barton calls interior freedom – a state of wide-openness to God – relinquishing whatever might keep me from choosing for God what I want God to do for me – that’s a greater challenge. We will always hold ourselves back from being fully open to knowing the will of God until we reach a place of accepting that there’s no ‘catch,’ no limit to the goodness of God. In Process Theology, this is the idea of trusting that God has the next best option before us every step of the way. It’s not a once and for all – made the choice and I’m fallen for good or that the path is never afforded me again. God always has the next good thing primed for our choosing. This is comforting when you’re in a pinch. When you feel life is spiraling out of control and you can’t see clearly the way ahead. Believe in the goodness of God. Trust that the next right thing is all that we need to focus on in those moments. Do the next right thing.

Barton’s second foundational building block of the discernment process is the belief that love is our primary calling. You ask yourself this question: “Which choice enables me to keep following God into love.” There may be other factors to consider, of course, but the deepest one will always be, “What does love call for in this situation? What would love do?” Love is such an inconvenience sometimes, isn’t it? It challenges our self-centeredness. It makes us vulnerable. It’s risky. There’re no guarantees. But if we fail to ask this question of ourselves in Christian discernment, then we miss the whole point of the Christian life in the first place. I think industry has skewed some of this “love” question for us. Love has been materialized or industrialized to an extent that it has become a commodity. Seth Godin noted this very thing about art. He said,

“Art has been around for a really long time. Music has been around for a really long time. Painting and sculpture and plays have been around for a really long time. But it’s only in the last fifty years that there’s been an industry… they call it the music industry, the movie industry… that’s new … It used to be, you didn’t become an artist to become rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, because you had an emotion to share.”[3]

These mixed motives throw us off in the discernment process.

The disciples going after this “Lord-needs-it” colt surely had some conversation on the way to the village. ‘This is it,” one said to the other. “Yep. He’s gonna be king!” “Fer shure.” “And we’ll always be able to say we were the ones who got the wheels that he rode into his coronation on.” I don’t know. They probably sorted through their own motives and concerns, wonderings and selfish ambitions. Who knows? This purity of love question about following God into love is an important component of discernment. Jesus is clear at this point. Question one: “Is God good?” No doubt. Question two: “What’s love’s next move?” Clarity. He’s going to enter the main arena and demonstrate what love looks like. It’s time. Which opens us to the third, and final, building block of discernment Barton which shares the belief that “God communicates with us through the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation.”

This spiritual confirmation starts with a prayer of indifference. That’s a counterintuitive thought… indifference is the worst, right? Luke-warmness is nauseating. That’s scriptural. But this prayer of indifference is such a Zen moment of clarity and openness in the presence of God. In this case it means, “I am indifferent to anything but God’s will.” I want God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. In such a space I become capable of relinquishing whatever might keep me from choosing for love. Jesus prays, “Your will be done, God.” Final word. That’s clarity. Teenage Mary, the would-be-mother-of-Jesus, demonstrates this courage when most of us worried about who snap chatted whom and what color of bands to get in our braces. She’s told there’s a calling on her life to walk this pregnant road and she’s such a baller. She says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38). No wonder Jesus had such strength. No wonder, as he stood on that mount and imagined entering Jerusalem, that he was clear about his direction.

This is so hard, don’t you think? I do. To come to a place of indifference on such weighty choices? Barton says, however, “Until we have come to a place of indifference, any prayer for wisdom may well be something akin to a rigged election.” What do you, what do I, need to set aside in order to be open to what God wants? We may struggle to get to such a spiritual place. And when such is the case, “All we can say to God is, “I know I am not indifferent. I know there is still something in me that is clinging to my own agenda. If I am to become indifferent, you will have to do it in me.” (Barton). Such a period of waiting to follow can be challenging but can also feel deeply right in our bones – right where we need to be. Like the prophet Jeremiah who wanted to quit prophesying but couldn’t shut it up even in his bones, and Jesus who stood to enter the city, marching toward his crucifixion, there is something like that in all of us – something so essential to who we are and who God made us to be that we cannot set it aside without imploding. What is that for you? What is that calling? What is that risk? What is that truth? And what. are. you. going. to. do. about. it?

The-Lord-needs-it password works. The colt is released to carry Jesus into the city, the disciples do that thing where you interlock your fingers so he can step up into their hands and be hoisted onto the colt and they’re off. The case of the Monday’s crowd awakened, and the celebration was on. People rushed out to see! Business people pulled off their expensive suit jackets and threw them in the streets ahead of the colt carrying Jesus as sign of respect. A trio of trumpet players, moved from their open cases collecting coins for playing New Orleans’s style jazz, stood and blared, “All Glory, Laud and Honor!” No mutes. Full blast. The crowds grew in their chanting and it was deafening. The religious folks were concerned about the ruckus as there were additional Roman military folk on hand to keep things under control. The Romans didn’t need much reason to get forceful with people and nothing ruins a good Passover Party like a riot. The Pharisees tried to get in earshot of Jesus, yelling, “Jesus – seriously – this is a problem. You’re gonna ruin Passover for all of us. Get your disciples under control.” But Jesus knows the time has come… and there’s nothing more to be done than step into his full calling of love. Jesus hollers back, perhaps with a knowing shrug, “If they keep quiet, the stones would do the cheering for them.”

And so it is. The launch of this most holy of holy weeks. Are you up for it? What prayers do you need to pray? What time do you need to set aside? What discernment will you do to determine your next steps? How will you recognize and respond to the very presence of God? May we begin with a prayer… the words of Thomas Merton, to guide us into the mystery of this moment, of this week, of the greatest decisions of our lives. Let us pray…

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. and I hope I have that desire in everything I am doing…”[4]

theme verse :: “See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:24)

Some of us have been so shaped by shame-based family or church systems that we resist entering into deeper levels of self-awareness for fear of being debilitated even further. We counter that resistance with, “But God loves us unconditionally,” and indeed God does. However, we are still inclined to dodge ourselves to avoid the possible pain of shame or rejection. The famed Psalm 139 includes the paradox that we invite God to search and know us even as we acknowledge in the same breath that God already does. As Ruth Barton notes, “This may point to the fact that the real issue in self-examination is not that I am inviting God to know me (since God already does) but that I am inviting God to help me know me.” Becoming more aware of who we’ve been and who we are may be the very best indicator of who we can become yet.

Psalm 139:1-18; 23-241 O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. 5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. 7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. 17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. 24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

September 22, 2007. Less than two years before my family would move to Tulsa from Indianapolis to join you in ministry. I was watching highlights from the college football happenings of the day and a fiery head coach of the Oklahoma State Cowboys lit up a press conference following a victory of all things over Texas Tech. Coach Mike Gundy didn’t comment on the game but went right after a published article about his benching of the starting quarterback. He didn’t like the media picking on his young players. The line that lingers for all of history and follows this coach most everywhere he goes was of course, It has inspired many-a 40th birthday cake ever since. The press conference went viral… one of the very first viral videos in college football to do so as Social Media was a new medium. Mike Gundy’s offensive coordinator at the time, Larry Fedora, missed the blow up of his boss but knew something had gone down at the press conference. That night, Fedora walked across the cul-de-sac where he lived to Gundy’s house, knocked on the door and said, “What the heck happened in your press conference?” Gundy invited him in and said, “I’ll show you. It’s already on YouTube.” Fedora said, “OK, but what the heck is a YouTube?”

I sent my wife a meme this weekend of Gundy’s famous quote as I hit the big 4-0 myself. She’s been waiting all this time for me to grow up and finally, I’ve apparently crossed some threshold. “I’m a man. I’m 40!” The truth is, what became a satirical gaffe for most of the country was hard on many of the people involved. Reflecting ten years later, Gundy said, “That whole thing was harder than people remember, and honestly, it was harder for a lot of people than I realized at the time.” While some saw his tirade positively, seeing a coach who would stand up for his players, others saw his tirade as bullying the media and less than helpful for some of the players, the quarterback, Bobby Reid, chief among them. Reid transferred away from OSU to Texas Southern and said of the tirade: “It basically ended my life.” It’s been years of processing that three minute episode. After four years, Coach Gundy and the former quarterback made peace with the incident and each other. Two years after making peace, Reid joined the OSU staff working in quality control for a couple of years. Gundy also made peace with the journalist who wrote the article and continues to reflect on the evolution of his life.

Gundy said, “I see that guy on that video and I see a guy who was going to work every single day with his fists clenched, feeling like he’s gotta scrap for every single inch every single day.” He can’t recall the last time he watched the clip voluntarily, but he doesn’t have to. That stalking, shouting, pointing man is permanently embedded on the memory card of his mind. “Don’t misunderstand, we’re still fighting for everything we get around here. But if you could go back in time, I would want to put my arm around that guy and say, ‘Hey dude, it’s going to be OK.’ It’s all part of what Gundy described on the decade anniversary of the incident as “Ten years of realizing you aren’t right about everything all of the time.”[1]

Is there any among us who couldn’t benefit from some self-reflection of the stories of our lives? We’ve all got these moments… maybe when we fell or stumbled or overreacted or chose poorly or caused harm or said that thing or whatever it may be that we’ve either allowed to remain an open wound or have done some spiritual work to let it scar … not forgotten… but healed over, learned from, stronger, more compassionate for facing it and growing through it. This isn’t fully an age thing… though age brings some wisdom that only the passage of time allows. This is an intentional thing, a vulnerable thing, a come-to-Jesus meeting with yourself – if not your circles of accountability.

We’re in deep today friends. Not going to hide that. We’re not playing in the shallow end of the pool today. “We’re far from the shallow now…” to bring Gaga into the whole thing. It’s the poignant truth of the moment. Next Sunday, we’ll wave Palm Branches and recall the first gathering for communion on Maundy Thursday and look up at the cross on Good Friday where Jesus will stare back into our eyes. That’s next week. Are you ready for that? What clutter do you need to clear in your soul, in your conscience, in your heart, in your relationships? This ain’t no joke. We’re in the deep end of this Sacred Rhythms series and we’ve got to look deep inside ourselves. Ruth Haley Barton has been our companion in this series. She calls this moment the practice of self-examination. She quotes Andreas Ebert who said,

“Many avoid the path of self-knowledge because they are afraid of being swallowed up in their own abysses. But Christians have confidence that Christ has lived through all the abysses of human life and that he goes with us when we dare to engage in sincere confrontation with ourselves. Because God loves us unconditionally – along with our dark sides – we don’t need to dodge ourselves. In the light of this love, the pain of self-knowledge can be at the same time the beginning of our healing.”

This so reminds me of the regular question Jesus asked of those approaching him with a want, a need, a desire: “Do you want to be made well?” Such a piercing question. Well? What about you? What about me? When it comes to addiction and trials and the damaging patterns we create in our lives, we know it is often said, “Until we want it… until we are willing to suffer the pain of acknowledging our out-of-control-realities and that the consequences of not healing are worse than the requirements of change (and even the loss of change), we can’t really heal.” Do you want to be made well?

There comes a time in our spiritual walk where one of the main things God is up to is lovingly holding up a mirror before our souls that we might see ourselves more clearly. It’s a sobering moment. It may be what Paul meant when he wrote to the Romans (12:3), “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather ‘think of yourself with sober judgment,’ in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” It’s time to take a closer look. Few of us may be excited about this exercise. And our culture is quick to hold up a different mirror before God can get the true mirror to reflect who we are. Some of us have been so shaped by shame-based family systems or religious experiences that we don’t want to examine the soul any deeper than we have to. We fear that we will forever tread water in a pool of shame or remorse. Sometimes, our quest for perfection is so pronounced that we couldn’t bear facing the truth of our own shadow sides without becoming completely unraveled. “Just trying to hold life together by a thread, here,” we say. “Don’t clip the thread or it will all come undone.” We all want to know that someone knows all there is to know about us and loves us anyway. We generally want this, however, without doing the hard spiritual, self-reflective work of being totally honest with ourselves.

King David – a significant Psalmist – gives us Psalm 139 which would be worth a daily read if you’re up for it. It is a Psalm that is often read in poignant moments of life and death. It’s the one about God knowing every bone in our body – even as we were being formed in our mother’s womb, God knows the number of our days. It is often titled, “The Inescapable God.” “Whether I walk in the thick of trouble or am flying high,” says David, “you are there.” At times, I wonder if David is glad that he can’t escape God’s presence or if he’s really annoyed about the whole situation. “Can I not get a moment of privacy, God?” It’s like a parent trying to use the restroom in peace with little toddlers running around the house. They. are. always. there. And while on a first reading, it seems David is asking God to investigate his life… see if there is any wickedness within him and, to quote another of his Psalms, “Create a clean and right spirit” within him. But, as Barton notes, this may point us beyond to a deeper soul level than simply, “God, look at me. What do you see?” She says, “This may point to the fact that the real issue in self-examination is not that I am inviting God to know me (since God already does) but that I am inviting God to help me know me.”

Instead of inviting God to help me know me, we tend to invite social media platforms to tell us who we are. We are dimly aware that everybody else can’t possibly be as successful, rich, attractive, relaxed, intellectual and joyous as they appear to be on Facebook. Yet we can’t help comparing our inner lives with the curated lives of our friends. Facebook works with an outside company to gather data (surprised?) on the cars people actually own. They also have data on the cars people associate with by posting about them or liking them on Facebook. Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedes are about two and a half times as likely to announce their affiliation on Facebook as are owners of ordinary makes and models. How ‘bout that? What about musical tastes? Spotify reports that twenty-nine of the forty musicians women listen to most frequently are also the artists most frequently listened to by men. Facebook tells another story. Men have underplayed their interest in artists like Katy Perry on Facebook but she was the tenth most listened to artist among men, beating out Bob Marley, Kendrick Lamar and Wiz Khalifa – all of whom have far more male “likes” on Facebook. We aren’t making honest reflections of ourselves. A frequent quote of Alcoholics Anonymous members is helpful here:
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reported these findings after spending five years peeking into people’s insides.[2] He studied aggregate Google search data noting how people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal on Social Media. He found when wives spoke of their husbands on social media, the top five descriptors for, “My husband is… are “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest” and “so cute.” On Google the only one of those five utilized to complete that phrase was “amazing.” The other top responses? “My husband is… “a jerk,” “annoying,” and “mean.” Davidowitz’s research data of five years was surprisingly comforting to him. He felt less alone in his insecurities, anxieties and struggles. He trusts Google’s autocomplete far more than people’s Social Media posts. “Type in “I always…” he writes, “and see the Google suggestions that arise based on other people’s searches. “I always feel tired” or “I always feel bloated…” are top searches which is a stark contrast to social media where everybody “always” seems to be on a Caribbean vacation. Don’t let Social Media be the primary investigator of your life. Invite God to help you know you better.

If God truly knows us better than any human ever possibly can, then let’s open our lives fully in God’s presence. Use Psalm 139 as a daily review. This self-examination is an ancient tradition known as the examen of consciousness. This may take only a few minutes at the close of every day, asking ourselves, “How was God present with me today?” “What promptings did I notice?” “How did I respond or not respond?” This may be harder at first, but with a little consistency, the examen will begin to shift the way we encounter the world during the day. We’ll start looking at the world with new eyes and with more reflective vision. The Psalm also helps us consider the goodness of our lives… celebrating it in all of our fearfully-and-wonderfully-made-ness. “How is my very being a blessing today? My body? My soul? My relationships?” This self-examen then leads to our own awakening to the darkness within. This is harder of course, and more vulnerable. It’s hard to acknowledge that we have a shadow side. But David, confident that God has created him as deeply good, is also able to let the parts that are confusing even to himself come into the light of God’s presence so that God can show him how to confront his shadow side. “Search me, God, know me, check me on the wicked stuff, cleanse me and move me into the everlasting way.” In part, this is David acknowledging as he does in this Psalm: “Even the darkness is not dark to you.” God can deal… and God invites us to face it too… then, and only then, can we begin to imagine healing. Confession is the only impetus to forgiveness. Can we get there? Are we willing to go to those depths with God? with ourselves?

Ram Das says,

This is what Richard Rohr calls essential to the classic “spiritual schedule” of our lives: “Some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life with which you simply cannot cope using your present skill set, acquired knowledge, or willpower.”[3] He says this will lead us to the edge of our own private resources. We must “lose” at something. It’s the only way that the mysterious grace of God can get to us to change. It is only there that we let go of our egocentric preoccupations and are willing to go deeper. We’ve got to be out of the driver’s seat for a while or we never learn to relinquish control. The Gospels show us better than anything else that life is tragic but graciously shows us that we can not only survive but, more importantly, grow from the tragedy. Joseph Campbell says, “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” Julian of Norwich says it even better: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall – and both are the mercy of God.” This is the journey we’re on. “God, search me. God, help me see me as you see me. Help me to know myself honestly so that I can become my best self for you, and my family and my community and the world.” This is what it means to bring our whole selves before God. No matter your age or stage… 14, 40, 60, 80, 100… that number doesn’t make you who you are. It doesn’t define your manhood or womanhood or personhood. What matters is the willingness to examine what is real and true… about us… about God… and pray our lives forward into greater health, understanding, and wholeness.

I want to close this morning with what is called “The Prayer of Abandonment” by Brother Charles de Foucauld who wrestled with what it meant to bring the entirety of himself before God some 150 years ago. May you, with a spirit of openness, allow his prayer to be ours today…

God, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all.Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures — I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul: I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my God. Amen.[4]

theme verse :: "Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’” (1 Kings 19:5b)

Civilizations have long valued and cared for the mystery that is the human body. The Christian practice of honoring the body is, as Stephanie Paulsell notes, “born of the confidence that our bodies are made in the image of God’s own goodness.” The complexities of physical health meet every single one of us; sometimes in similar ways, at other times in
altogether opposite ways. However, as Paulsell also points out, “It is through our bodies that we participate in God’s activity in the world.” At the prompting of an angel, Elijah’s physical health became necessary to sustain his spiritual calling. It seems paying attention to our bodies can steady a sacred rhythm that will help God transform the world
through our physical vessels.

1 Kings 19:1-8Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. 4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7 The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

According to the World Nap Organization – yes there is such a thing – nearly 40% of nappers feel guilty for indulging in a little shut-eye. Maybe we feel guilty because we see napping as weakness. Maybe we feel guilty napping because there is so much to be done… how could we be so selfish as to take a nap? It may be why one person said, “Taking naps sounds so childish. I prefer to call them ‘horizontal life pauses.’” Whatever you got to do, right? We forty percenters have our reasons for the guilt, I suppose. But the sixty percenters remind us how great naps can be! Our staff was swapping ‘nap memes’ this week for fun as we broke open this conversation at our staff meeting. One said, “Yeah, there’s a nap for that.” Naps are the original life hack. Sad? There’s a nap for that. Tired? There’s a nap for that. Angry? There’s a nap for that. Isn’t that true?

There was an American business man who went on vacation to another country and came across a local fisherman who was unloading his fishing boat. “How long it take you to catch those fish?” the businessman inquired? “Only a little while,” the fisherman said. The American was incredulous. “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more? Plenty of day left!” Fisherman said he could but didn’t see the point. He said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and in the afternoon take a siesta with my wife Maria. I have a full life.” The businessman tried to lay out for him a business plan on a napkin, showing him how if he caught more fish he could expand the business, buy more boats, hire other fishermen, eventually make millions. “Millions?” the fisherman asked, “Then what?” The American replied, “That’s the best part. You could retire. Sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, and take siestas with your wife.” Does that sound about right? We are culturally driven to push and push and push ourselves and then push a little more regardless of any cost to our bodies and our spirits. And I’m not arguing for a poor work ethic here. I’m just acknowledging that when our bodies are not synced well with our spirits, both will suffer.

It may be why the most appropriate meme of the morning was also shared by our staff team.

Never underestimate the spiritual power of a nap and a snack.

This is the very passage we ponder this morning as we’re about midway through our Lenten series entitled Sacred Rhythms, inspired by Ruth Haley Barton’s book by the same title. Today? Flesh-and-blood spirituality – the consideration of our bodies as holy vessels that carry some very unique essence of the character of God.

Elijah was certainly one of those very unique humans – a prophet celebrated by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. “He’s kind of a big deal,” as some are prone to say. He shows up in the Hebrew Bible – what we generally call the Old Testament or First Testament – in the book of 1st Kings. Now, 1st Kings represents a forever struggle that is as rampant today as it was back then. This idea of sovereignty – of authority, power, control – theologians have wrestled with it for years – “IsGod in total control? Does free will alter sovereignty? Are we partners? Do we have agency or is it all pre-destined anyway and makes no matter what we do?” Plenty of arguments over coffee tables and dinner tables and boardroom tables and even communion tables. God’s sovereignty is one of the most difficult things for people of faith to live out in everyday routines. From our personal daily affairs to the direction of the cosmos – how do we trust that God not only ‘is’ but also is leading us somewhere?

A couple of authors (among other things), Don Miller and Bob Goff were hosting a leader’s retreat. It was sort of loosely scheduled to the point that on the second day, Bob asked, Don, “What are we doing next?” Bob’s a total Seven on the Enneagram for any of our Enneagram Class students out there – always up for the next adventure – who needs a schedule, right? What fun is that? But Don answers his question saying, “Oh, I thought we’d just let them have 3-4 hours of free time.” Bob says, “Don… people want to be led somewhere.” So they decided to load up the group on a boat and ride out to this majestic waterfall and asked some leading questions given their setting and it blew them all away.[1] Just a little guidance. A little leadership. While there’s a place for downtime and all of that… when it comes to our faith… don’t we want to be led somewhere? Herein lies the struggle. Who do we trust to lead? God? Or the rest of us? And how… do… we… know what’s what? Elijah was down for this battle over God’s sovereignty and the others being raised as opposing gods themselves.

This is part of our faith ancestor’s history – the Hebrew Kings which begin in the books of Samuel. This story shares that it was not God’s idea that the Hebrews have a king… but here we are. And it never worked out that well. Five hundred years and more than forty kings, there wasn’t much evidence that they they got anywhere all that effectively. A few bright spots – like David and Hezekiah and Josiah – but even then the brightness was pretty dim. No matter our best intentions, humanity’s ability to lead often caroms into realms of destruction of some kind. 1st and 2nd Kings are, as Eugene Peterson claims, “a relentless five-hundred-year documentation proving that the Hebrew demand of God to “have a king” was about the worst thing they could have asked for.” But… as he goes on to note…

“In the midst of the incredible mess these kings are making of God’s purposes, God continues to work toward the peaceable kingdom and uses us in the work.” God doesn’t discard us or detour around us but says, “Come on. We’ll redeem this yet.” God’s purposes, then, get worked out in confrontation and revelation, in judgment and salvation, but they are worked out. God’s rule is not imposed or forced, making every man and woman conform to justice and truth and righteousness, but it is worked within them… much of the time invisible and unnoticed but always patiently and resolutely there.”[2]

So in this book of Kings, we have God processing a way through, carrying out life through some of the most unlikely and uncooperative people who have ever lived. If nothing else, this should give us some hope today as well. Elijah enters the picture a couple of chapters ahead of our text for today. Not much fanfare in the introduction. One version simply says, “And then this happened: Elijah the Tishbite, from among the settlers of Gilead, confronted Ahab…” and he drops a prophecy about a long drought coming. How would you like your introduction for all of history to be, “And then this happened…” What happens next is some amazing moments of miracles and healing and survival and Elijah coming to a place of battle against the opposing communities who worshiped Baal – not the Hebrew God, Yahweh. You may have heard this story of the great test – Elijah on his own versus huge group of Baal followers. The contest? Whose God would respond to the call for fire? Again – we don’t seem to do all that well talking to each other – we’d just rather have winner-take-all contests. So here we go; the my-God-can-beat-up-your-God contest. The short of it? The Baal prophets try first and no matter what they try, they can’t call down fire on their sacrificial ox. Elijah, feeling confident, has his altar all fixed up and drenched with water… water logging the whole thing for the powerful effect. He does a few card tricks to entertain the crowd while the people were drenching his wood pile. And then it was time and he prayed that God might show up in a big way and the whole thing erupts in flames and the crowd goes wild! But, being upstaged, the opponents were ready to fight now and its this huge massacre and Elijah “wins” if you want to call it that and he gets out of Dodge knowing he’s now a wanted man and will most likely be hunted down and killed. This finally leads us to the nap and snacks.

Elijah has been on the run. His adrenaline has crashed, and he’s exhausted and, to be honest, he’s just tired of it all. He feels alone. Nobody else cares. Everybody else quit the committee and he’s been left doing all the work. Do you know this frustration? So Elijah finds a broom tree. We wondered at staff meeting what a broom tree looks like. This is what we found first. Then, this. The text says, “a solitary broom tree.” He’s the last lonely prophet and so his greatest affinity is this lonely, solitary broom tree. Elijah is just going off: “God, kill me now. I’m done.” We all have surely felt this way… and often when our bodies are exhausted… it’s why Sabbath keeping and care of our bodies and rest are not just “good ideas,” they are essential to our wellbeing. Our spirits will not be well if we can’t do our best to care for our bodies. Now… I know our bodies betray us sometimes… from no doing of our own, we are stricken with disease or injury and we have struggles that are out of our power to heal. It’s part of the amazing mystery that is our flesh and bones. How are these fleshy suits somehow vessels where God’s spirit is planted to do some meaningful work? And why is it that we are so abusive and hateful to our own bodies and the bodies of others? We reach moments where we have claimed that male bodies are more important than female bodies or straight bodies are more important than gay bodies or white bodies are more important than bodies of a deeper hue.

Ozola Hughes, grandmother of a ministerial colleague of mine, died this week – “98 years young,” she said. My friend posted a picture of her Gigi’ beautifully brown hands. I couldn’t help but think of what those hands and her very body have experienced in the last 98 years. A black woman, born in 1921, raised in the South, without the same rights as others because of her body. And yet… this Spirit that expressed through her granddaughter – whose black body leads a multi-racial Disciples church in Dallas – says, “We are happy to wait on the Lord…” as she affirms the word of the prophet Isaiah.[3] How do we exist well, at home even, in our bodies, friends? The Christian practice of honoring our bodies (even when we must claim the sin of our history and our present of not honoring everyone’s bodies) is born of the confidence that our bodies are made in the image of God’s own goodness – in diverse and marvelous ways. And if this is so, caring for our bodies is indeed a spiritual practice.

When there’s not a “check engine light” flashing, we may ignore our body in favor of other “more spiritual” endeavors but loving our bodies – caring for our bodies – is as spiritual an endeavor as any. Ruth Haley Barton gave this growing thought and ultimately said, “I grew more and more curious about what it might look like to glorify God in my body.”[4] She, like most of us, can surely recall moments of gratitude for the particular body we were given and moments when we wished mightily for a different one. Our culture will be the first to tell us that our vessels aren’t good enough. Culturally we have an excessive and misdirected focus on the “perfect” body and we couple that with disturbing levels of irreverence regarding human sexuality – all of which makes it more difficult to know how to relate to the body in a spiritual way. But Biblically – the body is a place where the presence of God can be known and experienced. Jesus put on flesh, lived and thrived and struggled and died… but also says, “This is my body, given for you.” Flesh and blood spirituality… body and spirit… both gift. Neglect of the body is the neglect of spirit and may lead to Elijah’s inclination in exhaustion to say, “Done. God, I’m done. Take me out.”

This scene is truly the inspiration of the Snickers commercials about people being desperately grumpy when they’re hangry. “I want to die!” he shouts, and an angel shows up and says, “Eat this and take a nap.” The result when his body gets some rest and nourishment? His perspective changes. The angel of God essentially says, “Take care of your body… you’ve got a long journey ahead of you and you won’t make it otherwise.” Interesting enough, it wasn’t until he attended to his body that he was able to hear what God wanted of him. In our own ways, we need to move from ignoring or despising our bodies and allow them to become an ally in the reorientation of our internal and external lives. We seem to be more able to trick our minds for a while… but our bodies tend to not let us slide by without consequence. Wholeness is our congregational star word this year. God created us for wholeness. That spiritual wholeness includes collaboration with our bodies. Feel your body… how does it want you to pray? How is it leading you to serve? How does it call you to connect with your spirit?

Our bodies are beautiful in their being and their purpose. It is our bodies that allowed us to be the Body of Christ all over this city yesterday as we served in a congregational day of service called, “In Christ’s Name.” Our bodies allowed us to embody hope and move about… from Pastor’s Class students and their elder Faith Partners to families and Sunday School classes putting together Street Survival kits, detailing the Family Promise Van, church kitchen deep cleans and engaging partner ministries in the city. That is embodied prayer. At some point, we move beyond the vanity of our bodies to the glory of our bodies.

My grandfather always used to laugh when the great-grands who had barely discovered their fingers and their voices would pinch the back of his hand and say, “Old skin.” He just smiled and laughed and enjoyed their marveling. They weren’t judging or recommending new skin cream… they were just connecting bodies and souls with one whose lap might as well have been the throne of God to them. At some point we, as Richard Rohr says, “enjoy the moon itself instead of fighting over whose finger points to it most accurately, quickly, or definitively.”[5] Just look at that moon. Wow. We chased the moon the other night — “That’s a blood moon,” the kids said from the back seat. We couldn’t quite see it so we chased it… down the side roads, past the grove of trees until we found a clearing and there it was in all its glory. Our bodies, standing, marveling at the universe… simply a part of the greater picture of God’s cosmos. There is a knowing… a deep knowing… that vanity can’t contain. I don’t need your body any more or your image or your glory… God has settled in my very vessel… and it’s good. God even said, “It’s very good.”

Look. Bodies climb cliffs and dunk basketballs. Bodies move paint brushes and write poems. Bodies run marathons and embrace friends. Bodies lend a helping hand and wipe tears of loved ones. Bodies help strangers across the street and stir ingredients to make wedding cakes. Bodies are baptized in water and deliver babies. Bodies even breathe into other bodies that aren’t breathing and that breathless body breathes again. At some point, we come to know that we all have bodies – unique and beautiful and colorful – and despite any difference we see in our bodies, we are, as one writer said, “equally naked underneath our clothes.” That may not feel like a whole lot of knowing but even this little bit of honesty and vulnerability gives us a strange, peaceful, kinship. Every body needs rest and nutrition, exercise and connection and… as we learn from Elijah… every body needs all of that in order to best hear what God has to say to us. So… love your vessel. Have a little grace for your vessel and the vessels of others; take a nap and have a snack… God is waiting for a word with you.

theme verse :: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought...” (Romans 8:26)

Many of us have learned a “go-to” prayer over time –often a bedtime prayer as a child or The Lord’s Prayer as we prayed it each week in worship. But ask anyone without notice to say a prayer aloud or share about their prayer life and most get wide-eyed and tight lipped pretty quick. It seems, however, that as our spirit’s mature, we recognize that the gift of prayer shifts as well –often from a sense of communication to God to an experience of communion with God. How might we move from “What do I pray?” to “How is my life a prayer?”

special music :: 'Come As You Are' (Crowder) :: The Rising Band; Isaac Herbert, leader

Romans 8:26-28Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

I could be wrong. No need to wait for the but, here. It’s not coming. I could be wrong. Period. I’ve got to say, I’m sort of relieved. Sure, we want to be right. We believe what we believe, we do what we do, we fight for the things we fight for because we believe we’re right. But some of us never seem to get to that point of saying, “I could be wrong.” It really is sort of refreshing. Do you want to try? Just say it: “I could be wrong.” Doesn’t it feel good? Nah. We much prefer to be right. So I won’t speak for you. I’ll just speak for myself. I could be wrong, you know. I mean, I’m thinking specifically about prayer in this moment. I’m sure there was a time when I once thought prayer was about getting what I want. I’d heard all the quips: “God wants me to have the desires of my heart.” Terrific. I want to date her, drive that, live there, go to that school and do that job. Done. Even Jesus said something that turned into a great worship tune I sang in college: “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open to you… the door will be open to you.” Boom. Prayer. This stuff is easy. Well… not everything turned out as I prayed so I was confronted with what that was all about. You’ve had this struggle too.

Think Bedlam. Oklahoma Sooners versus O-State Cowboys – always the biggest game of the year around these parts and half the crowd is praying for a Sooner victory and the other half for the Cowboys but we all know God prefers the _________, right? So you could be wrong. Ah… so then what about those prayers? And it gets more serious than football. I got a text last week from a friend whose mother was in the hospital… things weren’t looking good. My friend texts me that his sister is praying for a miracle to heal their mom and my friend was praying for the suffering to end so their mom wouldn’t be in this terrible state any longer. That’s a little deeper isn’t it? What about those prayers? Another friend comes to me with a great heartache in her spirit about something she’s been facing for decades and is weary and scared and uncertain and she simply says, “I don’t know what I want from you… I guess I just want your prayers.” Of course. Another friend yet texts about a job interview – this would be a great career step for my friend and good for his family and he said, “Please pray me in…”. Absolutely. But do I pray he gets the job, and my other friend’s heartache gets removed and for a miracle for my other friend’s mom or his request that her suffering ends and she joins the great saints of the resurrection?

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Priest, wrote a great book called “Falling Upward,” addressing the two halves of our lives – which I highly recommend. And I’m soon to be officially “Over the Hill” myself which I can’t believe. I remember as a kid going to a family friend’s 40th birthday surprise party and we hid a bunch of “Over the Hill” gags around the house and I thought that Don must have known Jesus personally he was so old. Well, now that’s almost me so… pray for me? Anyway, Rohr quotes Paul in Romans 9 where Paul writes,

But Rohr says we only realize this is true in the second half of life. Rohr’s life halves are less numerical and more spiritually based. “We had to do the wanting and the trying and the achieving and the self-promoting and the accomplishing. The first half of life is all about some kind of performance principle. And it seems that it must be this way. We have to do it wrong before we know what right might be. In the second half of life, we start to understand that life is not only about doing; it’s about being.” He then tells a story about going home to Kansas after his father had just retired at the age of sixty-five.

For thirty-six years, his dad had painted trains for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. He had grown up poor during the Depression and the dust storms of western Kansas. Generationally, jobs were something you valued deeply and once you got one, you weren’t going to lose it. Never missed a single day of work in all those years. The company said, “He turned on the lights every morning.” Isn’t that something? And so here he is on Day One of retirement literally falling into his son’s arms in tears saying, “I don’t know who I am now. I don’t know who I am. … pray with me, pray with me.” Here is Richard Rohr, a grown man, a priest, supposed to be strong for his dad and he said, “I didn’t know how to do it. I guess I said the appropriate priestly words, but I didn’t know how to guide him into the second half of life and he was begging for a guide.”[1]

Our prayer lives may reflect this same struggle of claiming our identity. A church friend sent me an article[2] this week about the importance of community and it engaged this very idea. The author said, “I spent my days focused on optimizing myself: Endlessly working and improving, on a permanent quest to do as much as possible in the unforgiving confines of twenty-four hours. It was the only way I knew how to be. Compete. Excel. Win. She then said, “I never considered there might be a cost to a life of high-octane, high-reward competition.” Bill Gates reflected on aging and perspective, particularly regarding his work of the past year. He said that as a young man in his twenties, he was consumed with making Microsoft a personal-computing giant. Today, his focus is on other people. “Did I devote enough time to my family?” he asks himself now. “Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones?” These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much more meaningful.” Given this current season in your life, what is pulling your greatest reflective attention? And how do your prayers, if at all, reflect such a season?

The Apostle Paul brings a word for us today from his letter to the church at Rome. Rome! Now there was a place that was hustling and bustling with amazing world-class art, exquisite poetry, finely crafted moral philosophy and imperial decrees. People of great influence in this city. And Paul writes this little letter to a church there that would have mostly gone unnoticed in such a place. Its thirty years after the Jesus event – death, burial, resurrection – which had taken place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. Few of the elite in Rome were giving it much worry; nobody tweeted about the resurrection, you know? Peter didn’t post a selfie of himself on Instagram with the abandoned linens in the empty tomb. The movement took some time to catch on. But this letter of Paul’s – somehow, some way, in the midst of such deep and culturally important work – would soon leave all of those other writings in the dust; a world-altering word from a man whose life had been altered by an encounter with Jesus.

In the brief piece we look at this morning, Paul’s writing about the birth pangs of the world. Change, difficulties, tension, conflict – externally, yes, but Paul says, “That same turmoil is going on inside of you.” We’re yearning for deliverance from meaninglessness and we’re waiting and wondering and yes, even praying, for whatever that may look like for us. And when it all seems unanswered and growing in its complexities and our relationships get rocky and the job is uncertain and the desire isn’t coming to pass as easily as the praise song said it would, we get tired in the waiting. Paul says, “that’s exactly when God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along, making prayer out of our incoherent thoughts… even our deepest sighs that are beyond any words we could muster. The Spirit is right there.” The Spirit is right there? And then it hit me… made a lot of sense to me… and I could be wrong, remember? But this sounded a lot like keeping good company. Is that the true gift of prayer? The Spirit gets us…at the very essence of our being… and holds company with us. “That’s prayer,” I thought, “Keeping company with God.” There’s less a spirit of “fix-it” in this company and more a withness. There’s a change in your prayer life if you consider such a possibility.

How often I’ve just prayed, “God, fix it!” and not, “God keep company with me through this.” It doesn’t mean that we should never pray and plea for the desires of our hearts, for our needs, for great things that are needed in the world. The Hebrew writer said, “Come boldly before the throne of God with our prayers,” so there’s space for that and I trust in the power of those prayers, yes. But think of any maturing relationship you’ve had in your lives. Like when you’re first in that dating phase with someone and it’s all about the words. “We talked on the phone for like three hours last night.” And then you do that every night for a month; maybe two or six or twelve. The words! That’s how you connect at first but as the relationship matures, it’s not that you don’t still have things to say to each other – you should always ask new, inquisitive questions of the loves in your life – but there becomes a comfort in simply keeping company with that person. A knowing glance says what three hours of conversation once said. A reach for their hand speaks volumes without even uttering a word. Could our prayers grow in this withness with God too?

Think of some of the biggest moments in scripture. 23rd Psalm – the most known of all the Psalms – what does it say as a prayer? “I will fear no evil for you are with me.” That’s not fixing, that’s keeping company. The incarnation of Christ as we read in John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. The word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.” Withness. Or Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – as human a moment of any as the text says that Jesus is sweating blood as he’s praying over what is about to happen – his pending arrest and subsequent crucifixion. Jesus prays, “God if you can fix this, that would be my preference but if not, your will be done.” “God… if this doesn’t go the way I want it to go, then give me some new perspective on the matter at hand… help me see your take on this.” The interesting part here is my wondering if Jesus is projecting next onto the disciples what he wanted of his heavenly Father. He just wanted his Abba, Daddy, to be with him and he wasn’t feeling much withness in the stress of the moment. What does Jesus say to the disciples who had fallen asleep as he was praying blood out of his pores? “Can’t you stay awake with me for even an hour?” “Can’t you keep company with me? I’m kind of dealing with some big stuff here.” If you’ve ever wondered where God was in your time of need… maybe you know that feeling.

Life is tumultuous isn’t it? It’s often harder than we thought it would be. It’s more complex and things we assumed would be easy and a natural part of our lives – falling in love, having a child, raising a child, getting that job, retiring well, etc, etc, hasn’t panned out like we imagined. Life feels more like wave crashing down on another wave and we’re just trying to stay afloat without losing our minds or blowing up the good things that are holding us steady while the waves are raging in other areas of our existence. We may want a fix-it God in these moments, but we may only get some divine company who simply commits to guide us through it. I was amazed this week to learn about life as a Columbia River Bar Pilot.[3] Do you know about these pilots? Imagine a stretch of water so dangerous that even huge ships can’t cross it safely. It’s a place sailors call the “graveyard,” where hundreds of ships have sunk and thousands have lost their lives. But the global economy relies on navigating this place with shipping vessels every day to avoid economic collapse. The Columbia River Bar in the Pacific Northwest, located at the intersection of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean is such a place. It is considered one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world.

Not just any ship captain can navigate these ships so there are expert Captains that are trained to do this – their only job is to get on these ships out in the ocean and navigate those ships through the passage; a real Jesus take the wheel sort of vocation. In the 1960’s, these special captains would get to the ships by rowboat – sometimes enduring 25 foot swells – just to get to the ships. They’d scurry up those ships on a dropped rope ladder and then guide those ships through the rough waters. Today, it’s much more MacGyver than that. These expert captains get helicoptered onto these ships simply to guide them through the passage – some ten times a day – which ultimately moves $24 billion dollars in goods each year through this passage. Can you imagine a passage so treacherous that an expert withness is flown in to help you get through it? I wonder if that is the kind of company God keeps with us when we’re in those most difficult or uncertain places. And I imagine not a lot is said … just focused company… just a hand held in the waiting room at the hospital… just a tear wiped when the pain was clear but no words could repair. So many will say in times of tragedy or deepest challenge, “I just don’t know what to say.” “Just be there,” I’ll offer back. Just be good company. Silent presence is as powerful a prayer as you’ll ever pray. The Spirit already knows and recognizes the sigh.

Do you have these company keepers in your life? There are some people in my life whose spirits are deep… they don’t need to offer words anymore to prove that… they just are a well of spiritually-deep-second-half-of-life wisdom — and when I’m in prayer with them… and they look at me or send me a three word text, “I’m with you…” or they simply exhale; sigh … I believe them… I believe their spirit. I believe their withness. I feel their prayers washing over me. And I feel the Spirit’s agreement in our two-or-three-are-gathered moment. That’s keeping good company.

Jesus, post-resurrection, was having one last moment with his assembled team, tasked (big gulp) with transforming the world with all he had shared with them, before he ascends to heaven. Do you remember what he says to them? At the end of Matthew’s gospel he says to them, “Go into all the world, make disciples (people willing to learn the Way), and I will be with you.” I will be your withness. I will keep company with you all along the way…even to the end of the age. That seems to be the promise. I could be wrong. I wonder, however, if that is truly the greatest gift of prayer… and worth our daily practice… simply to keep holy company with God and one another… and trust that such is enough. Surely that’s the pray without ceasing idea… keeping constant company. The Spirit already recognizes our sighs… knows the need; holds it with us. And there is enough power in the holding to transform the world.

A colleague of mine… just this fireball of a woman who is retired professionally but engaged in the work of world-wide compassion sharing as much as any I know. She just spent time in Guatemala serving with partner communities and learned of a Mayan belief that suggests there is a fixed amount of suffering in the world. The idea is simply this: if you share your suffering with others, your burden is lightened. And if that person shares that suffering as well, the suffering diminishes yet again. The Mayans could be wrong. So could my friend. But she wonders about it. And so do I… at least in the power of holding each others joys and pains… keeping company with God and one another.

So when you text me or email me or call me or pull me aside or sit with me over coffee or in my office or however we communicate – there’s something about the gift of prayer that turns that communication into communion. There’s something in our withness that changes outcomes and strengthens weakness and brings hope to despair. When we say, “I’m holding that with you,” we’re trusting the Spirit to be with us too; to transform us, heal us. I could be wrong. Period. God already knows. So I’ll trust God with that without really needing to say any words at all.

Do you read Scripture primarily for information or transformation? Do you imagine it as a text book or a love letter? There is room for both realities, of course, but in creating a sacred rhythm between God and follower of God, it is good to consider what it means to savor the Scriptures. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Word of Scripture should never stop sounding in your ears and working in you all day long, just like the words of someone you love.” What is your relationship with our holy text? What could God open to you if you opened the Bible in a whole new way?

1 Samuel 3:1-10Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. 2 At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; 3 the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. 4 Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” 5 and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. 6 The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” 7 Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. 8 The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. 9 Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10 Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

The church elder got up to read the scripture chosen for the day and the young teenage boy selected to sing the refrain nervously stepped to the lectern and sang, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” I can remember it vividly. It was pure and holy and sacred. I remember being in Vacation Bible School as a young child learning to sing, “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” I remember when I first came to serve among you here in Tulsa, it was the practice of the elder reading the scripture to approach the Communion Table which set up high on the Chancel, to lift the biggest Bible you’ve ever seen and carry it over to the pulpit and spread wide it’s pages to be read before the congregation. It could have been read in many other ways but this visual was designed to say, “Look at this! Hold your breath for a moment! Something holy is about to be shared.”

I love the Bible. It is the book that has been in my life longer than any other book. From my picture Bible, to the one I received at my baptism to the one I received when I graduated from high school to the one my parents gave me at my ordination… the Bible has always been an essential part of my existence. It’s just a book, right? Pages run through a printing press, bound, and many shipped out of China to the ends of the world. China! The very country where the book itself has been banned at various points in her history. I’ve been to that very printing press in Nanjing. It is impressive. They had a running ticker of how many Bibles they had printed… tick, tick, tick. Amazing! Some six billion copies of the Bible have been sold. Harry Potter has only 400 million copies sold, coming in third place. Nine out of ten American households own a Bible – the average American household has three. The YOUversion Bible App[1] has already been installed over 365 million times on unique devices all over the world – 1,880 Bible versions in 1,288 languages — for free… and without advertising. Isn’t that something? I’ve heard Craig Groeschel, the LifeChurch founder whose church created the Bible App tell the story about how it happened. The short of it was a teenager had slipped into the office where a team was having some conversation and was like, “Uh, it would be super easy to make an app.” “Really?” they said. “Uh, yeah.” And just like that… he did and the world is reading the Bible again… a new generation… a new time, place, medium, village, language. Why tell you all of this? Because it is simply amazing to me. The reach. The impact. There is something beyond the words of the pages that transforms life like nothing else seemingly does.

“Hardest to pin down is the naked power of the book itself,” she says. “Millennia of readers testify that those who listen carefully find themselves addressed by a voice beyond the page that somehow penetrates and breaks things open. God, in some strange and unique way, actually talks here; and where God starts talking, chains are broken, wounds are healed, and whole worlds are upended.”[2]

So there’s that. But… we also know such power can be destructive. Many a war and tremendous violence have been conducted on somebody’s word that the “Bible told them so.” When the Hebrew writer says in Chapter four, “Indeed, the word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow…” some have used the Bible for that very purpose – to slice and dice and harm and exterminate whole communities or races of people or to draw castles around their own holy understanding that leaves little room for anyone else to get across the mote to share the joy of being on the inside. The murder in Christchurch, New Zealand, is shuddering… there is no place in any Holy Book that can justify such hatred and violence. Only deranged extremists of our faith and that of others have felt justified in such slaughter. It is not the peace which our Muslim, Jewish, and Christian siblings promote.

One way we can stride in this direction for peace is to encounter God in Scripture in a way that brings life and hope to all… not death or fear. I want you to think about your engagement with scripture. Maybe it’s always been a part of your life. Maybe you’ve given it little thought and have just chalked it up to a weird collection of stories that don’t have anything to say to us today. I wonder how you approach the Bible. Do you read Scripture primarily for information or transformation? Do you imagine it as a text book or a love letter? There is room for multiple realities, of course, but in creating a sacred rhythm between God and follower of God, it is good to consider what it means to savor the Scriptures. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, What could God open to you if you opened the Bible in a whole new way? That’s what we’re after today.

Scott Allender recently referred to these two Harvard psychiatrists who stated quite starkly the following: Ouch. We are the most over-informed, under-reflective civilization in human history. Whoa. Information is more accessible than ever. And we may eat it but we certainly are bypassing the chewing and digestive processes. My son Dane reminds our family of this every time we eat. He reminds me of his great-grandma Briley who always took an additional twenty/thirty minutes to eat her meal after the rest of us were done. Dane is the same way. And we’ll wait and he’ll say, “I’m just savoring my food, guys.” And like our information, we hardly have the patience to savor anything anymore. When’s the last time you savored Scripture? And if you are reading… are you just trying to get through it… to reach some reading plan goal?

Think about Luke 6 where Jesus talks about loving our enemies as a true mark of the Christian faith.[3] We’ve heard it before perhaps and we’ve got somewhere else to be soon so we just plow on through that chapter so we can check it off the list. But if you’re reading relationally or for spiritual transformation, you might only choose 6-8 verses and approach it with no other agenda than listening and deepening your intimacy with God. How does it feel when you read Jesus’ words, “Love your enemies.” Feel it. Wonder about it. And maybe you’ll start feeling some discomfort and a fist rising up from your gut that says, “I don’t this so! I’m not okay with that!” It surprises you because you were feeling all spiritual trying to do your daily scripture reading and now you’re just feeling all judgy (which we may be prone to do). But feel it a bit and ponder, “What in my life is pressed against what Jesus is saying here?” What may be revealed is that under my piety, there’s a part of me that doesn’t feel all that loving right now. In fact, I’m harboring some anger against someone who’s hurt me. I thought I had let that go but clearly its still there under my skin. What does this awareness on this particular day tell me about where I am not like Christ? Am I being transformed into a more loving person? Now… instead of just buzzing through the words, “Love your enemies,” – God and I are getting somewhere – some level of intimacy that may just change me in some deep way. This is how we were meant to read the Bible… not in quest of sound bites to back up our political leanings… but to engage the very Word of God… who is Christ himself… that we might be transformed. After all, this is the Bible’s bold hypothesis: “It’s a grand leap of faith – that there never was any closed cosmic system from which God could be barred or into which God has to break as a stranger… God is closer than the world ever dared to imagine.”

Rev. Good reminds us that “The early Christians believed the Bible was rightly read when it led to contemplation of, and participation in, nothing less than Jesus himself. This means we don’t just read Scripture – we read through Scripture like a window.” I think we have come to fear Scripture… a sense that we can’t understand it or that we should be more familiar with it or that we’ll not use it well and so we give up on the engagement. Ah… but don’t do that, my friends. Pick it up again, as if for the first time, to savor it a bit at a time… listening for what God may be saying to you now. While the text may be the same, your life changes day after day and therefore your encounter will be different time and time again.

I appreciated a friend who’s taking our Enneagram class on Wednesday nights who was struggling a bit to decipher what Number or personality type he may be. He said almost soberly, “I’ve been through some hard things and I’m not sure I’m the same now as I was back then.” Life does throw us some tough curveballs. Life is hard and we make choices and things happen that are out of our control and we wonder, “Who am I now?” And scripture can be a companion in a wholly new way. Those sacred texts are most effective not when we read them but when they read us. The more we can loosen some of our preconceived ideas or fundamental perceptions about what the text says or means and encounter it in a fresh way – the more we can see our lives in the new-thing-view that God may be doing in our lives now.

It’s why I picked, perhaps, an obscure text to speak about encountering God through scripture because the story of young Samuel doesn’t have anything to do with him engaging his sacred text, the Torah. Not at all. He’s just available. And if we could start with availability, we’d be well ahead of the game. Little Sam was living in a spiritually dry time… “The word of the Lord was rare in those days,” says the text. There was corruption and greed and bad stuff happening and it was just a spiritually dry time. But Sam was living in the Temple as was Eli the priest. And one night, Sam was dreaming perhaps when he hears his name called, “Samuel! Samuel!” He jumps out of bed and runs into Eli’s room hollering, “Here I am?” What do you need?” Now Eli’s up in years a bit. His bed time ritual takes some time with the Ben Gay and the whole bit and he’s tired. And this whipper snapper comes running in and waking him up. “Beat it, kid! It wasn’t me.” Sam goes back to bed but that voice again, “Samuel! Samuel!” And the boy shoots back into Eli’s room: “Yeah! I hear you calling me. Here I am!” And Eli says, “You’re killin’ me Smalls. I’m not yelling for you… get in bed. Now!” And Sam dips his head and climbs back onto his bunk. And I’ll be darned if Sam doesn’t hear his name called again. This time, he’s got to be thinking, “The old man has lost his marbles!” What else can he do but go see what Eli needs. “Hey there, sir. I heard you call my name and I’m back… please don’t yell at me.” And Eli, realizing like a parent does when something is truly up with their kid, he says to young Sam, “My boy, I see what’s happening here. The Lord is looking for some available ears. Go back to bed and when you hear your name called, respond by saying: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Don’t you think the kid is a bit wide-eyed now? We don’t pick that up in the story but I’d sort of be like, “Uh… will you come with me? And can I have a drink of water… and maybe a snack?” Anything from having to go back to bed. But Sam drags his blankey back to his room. He lays down and pulls the covers all the way up over the tip of his nose and stars at the ceiling… and waits. And lo and behold, the voice comes again: “Samuel!” Big gulp. What was I supposed to say? Oh yes. “Uh… speak, Lord, for your servant is all ears.”

That’s availability. That’s what we’re looking for. That’s the approach I’m suggesting we have when we approach the Bible. I don’t want to coerce you or manipulate you or brow beat you with Scripture. It’s too beautiful for that. I want you to encounter the living God and be willing to say, “Speak to me, Lord, I’m available and listening.”

There was an acronym floating around for a while… because Christians love themselves some acronyms, right? F.R.O.G. – forever rely on God. W.W.J.D. – What would Jesus do. We love ‘em, don’t we? There was one for the B.I.B.L.E. – Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Cute, right? And I get the sentiment. It’s a pithy statement and, at one point, maybe something I expected of the Bible myself – “sort of like a Roomba owner’s manual, only for the human soul.”

Rev. Good spoke of this too. She said,

“If the primary purpose of the Bible were to efficiently convey the most basic, universally relevant knowledge necessary to maintain a well-ordered life, most of us would expect a very different kind of book. We’d want a little more quick-reference-index, a little less poetry; a little more guidance on romance and dating, a little less detail on how to build a giant ark without power tools.” She says, but “this is no fairy-tale or snow-globe world. The Bible tells the story of what is. It’s the true story of a world where hearing is imperfect, where motives are mixed, where evil exists, where bias lingers, where good intentions can go wildly astray. And where God persists in showing up.”

If God persists on showing up then maybe I should too. For that’s where we meet the Word; the Word who is Christ himself. The Word that existed before words existed. Kayla McClurg continues that sentiment…

“The Word that longs to quiet the storms within and among us, light up our darkness, stir our complacency, bring us back fully to ourselves. The Word longs to be in conversation with us; not get our opinions on every subject, be impressed by our clarity and wit, but just hang out with us, dwell among us. The Word has come to teach us our mother tongue, our native language — the language of compassion and fearless encounter, the language of love.”[4]

Yes. Available. Encounter. Thank you, God.

How do you know God is calling? Even the idea of God calling you to do something feels so strange and like a call on your Smart Phone from an unidentified number – you’re not inclined to answer. There’s so many voices wanting to yank you into their sphere of influence. How do you know? E. Stanley Jones… missionary to India called this a “traffic jam of wills.” He was a bright young man in his early 20’s and everyone wanted a piece of him. His alma mater said, “We believe God is calling you to teach here.” His friend wrote him a letter, “I believe God is calling you to evangelistic work here in the States.” His denomination tells him, “We believe God is calling you to the mission field in India.” He felt called to India and served his whole life there. He remembers having this open conversation with Gandhi one day saying, “How can we make Christianity more natural here in India… more available to people who may be interested?” and Gandhi roughly says, “Christians should first seek to live more like Christ.”[5]

That’s always the challenge, right? We may be quick to say, “The Bible says…” but until we can show, “This is how Christ lives,” many won’t be inspired to crack open the Scriptures at all. The old adage, “You may be the only Bible some will ever read,” applies well here. Information alone just makes us arrogant if it doesn’t filter down through the clay to the roots of our souls where real, humble transformation takes place. Pastor Courtney is offering a Bible 101 course on Tuesday nights starting very soon. A brother in our very church and I are praying for clarity on the possibility of a Bible study on the Book of Acts for which we need some leadership to rise. Maybe these are calls of God on your life? Who knows?

Sometimes, when you’re struggling to hear the call of God, you’ve just got to make a new effort. Make a start at something. See if any traction is gained. Starting is always a sign of hope. Every time I get dressed to go out for a run, I’m hopeful that, even if I’m slow, my getting out there; trying something; making my legs available to what could lead to the transformation of my cardiovascular system, is hope. Making any beginning is stating the belief that a good outcome is possible. When we sense God calling us to make a beginning, at whatever that may be, it’s important to not let discouragers or opponents or distractions turn us away. What is waiting for a start in your life? What have you been wrestling with, wondering if God may be giving you a nudge? Have you tested it? Do you need some training for it? Have you sought the wisdom of scripture to simply make yourself available to God within the words of our holy text?

I was in third grade. My father, who was also my pastor, taught me a word from John 3:16 – again the number one scripture written on hairy chests of shirtless men at football games for decades now – isn’t it crazy where scripture shows up? You probably know this word. “For God so loved the world that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” My dad invited me to put my own name in that text where the word “world” was. “For God so loved Mark…” Now the sentence doesn’t read correctly if you don’t alter any of the rest but I can’t remember how we handled that. But that first part? Can’t shake it. Can’t forget it. “For God so loved Mark…” Really? “And you can do that?” I asked. “You can put other people’s names in there too?” “Until you cover the whole world, son.” I want to be available to that kind of God. That kind of love. That’s an encounter that can change the world. So, I’m listening, God. And maybe you’ll listen too… you know, for your name to be called? May we, like young Samuel, be ready to respond

[1]www.youversion.com[2] Meghan Larissa Good. The Bible Unwrapped: Making Sense of Scripture Today. Herald Press. Harrisonburg, VA. 2018. This quote as well as other places where Rev. Good is named in this message come from this book.[3]Sacred Rhythms. Ruth Haley Barton. IVP Books. 2006. Her influence is evident in this message as well as in the formation of the entire series. This paragraph about approach to scripture reading is an example she shares in this book.[4] Kayla McClurg, comments on John 1:1-18 for January 4, 2016. inwardoutward.org.[5]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQHIjCLcF6o

theme verse : “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” (Mk 6:31)

When is the last time you were quiet enough to hear your own heart beat? To feel it? Sense itsrhythm as if your very soul was trying to show itself to you in a marvelous and tangible way? Parker Palmer suggests “the soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy. But it is also shy.... if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently by the base of the tree, and fade into our surroundings, the wild animal we seek might put in an appearance."To find a sacred way forward, we must first create a foundation, or baseline, for God to buildupon. Our starting point? Solitude.

Mark 6:7-13; 30-32He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9 but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. 10 He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11 If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13 They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. 30 The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. 31 He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32 And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.

Last Wednesday night, this sanctuary was full of young and old, babies with that new car smell (but human, you know?) and saintly journeyers who have seen and been through some stuff. There were youth and middle aged, parents and singles and seekers and doubters. There were some grieving and others wondering why their body has betrayed them while another bounces up the aisle taking each step for granted. Many of you were there and so was I. It was a beautiful night to mark the beginning of a beautiful and deeply spiritual season we call Lent – which is something far greater than the glob of fabric you might pull out of your pocket. After those who chose to receive the mark of the cross in ash on their foreheads, we sat together in this space, mindful of our mortality, wondering about our deepest longings to be loved and connected to the One who fashioned us from the dust of the earth. Courtney invited us to put our hands over our hearts… to feel our hearts beat. To breathe in deep enough to feel our lungs press against the cage designed to hold them in place. It was a powerful moment to individually and collectively breathe deeply… asking the Spirit of God to fill us. When is the last time you were quiet enough to hear your own heart beat? To really feel it? Sense its rhythm as if your very soul was trying to show itself to you in a marvelous and tangible way? When have you slowed enough to focus on your very breath… one after another… each inhale and exhale holds almost an audible whispered word: “Gift. Gift. Gift.”

I once watched a doctor hold my newborn baby in the air by the ankles and give him a shake. I was alarmed. “What are you doing to my kid? Can you do that?” As a new parent, you have this sense that babies are so fragile, and you’ve got to handle them like grandma’s fine china. I remember driving home from the hospital with our first born going about five miles an hour with my hazards on the whole way. Traffic is stacking up behind us and I’ve got my arm out the window waving for them to “Go around!” I had precious cargo on board. But doc picked up my newborn son like he was rubber. But doc was doing all of this to help my son take his first breath. And this was more than a first breath… it was the gift of life itself. “Before anything else can be said about you, you have received a gift … God has given you life. Are you breathing?Gift. Gift. Gift.[1] Isn’t that extraordinary? We quickly forget this gift when we get on about our lives. We bump up against failure and pain, heartache and abuse and loss. While we grieve and feel and try to express all that is brewing within us, “a truth courses through the veins of all our bumps and bruises, and [that truth] is this: We have received.” You are here. You are breathing. And this sacred season of Lent invites us to go back that far, that deep, to the very heart beat of God. It is the question of this first Sunday of Lent. Do you remember the gift of your life? Your very breath? How do you remind yourself that its there? If you went on a hunt for your very soul, would you even know what you are hunting for?

Parker Palmer, an author and educator, says

“The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently by the base of the tree, and fade into our surroundings, the wild animal we seek might put in an appearance.”

We’re on a quest this Lenten season to regain the sacred rhythm that launched us in this world and today, we start with the gift and discipline of solitude as an entry point to re-connect with God in our extra-noisy, cluttered lives. Call it a soul hunt perhaps.

Jesus says to the disciples who have been out and about sharing the Good News they have come to know, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” Do you make any space in your life for such a practice? We don’t tend to be creatures with great practices of solitude. We like the noise. We prefer the energy of the crowd. We don’t want to have to be alone with our own spirit… with God. However, we also have our limits with that noise, don’t we? “She’s too much,” we say. “I can’t deal with him today.” It happens to all of us.

An elementary school teacher gave her students the assignment of writing what life will be like when they’re 100 years old. One little girl named Emma offered up a very honest response. See if you can relate. How many of you are ready to sign up for that life now? Emma may be on to something. The truth is, we live in a society that values productivity, success, achievement, and all-star status. Imagining time of solitude… silent space to listen to your own heart beat and feel your soul and your very breath again… in and out… gift, gift, gift. Forget about it. But this is extremely critical to building a spiritual foundation that can hold the rest of your life. Even daily doses of solitude will save you from the crash and burn that often takes down too many of us when we just can’t keep up anymore.

When we consider the three years of Jesus’ ministry (Three years! That’s it. Talk about getting a lot of work done in a short amount of time) … the primary work of his three years was to get ordinary people like you and me to remember their very life; their very breath… remember that life is a gift and they have what it takes to bring the kingdom of God to earth. To be effective in an ongoing way, however, these disciples would have to learn to make space to be with God alone; not confusing activity, even Godly activity, with simply being with God… recharged, renewed. When we are in “go” mode all the time, we start to think it is we who are creating the world again and again in seven days. Now… Jesus had the disciples active, yes. They had to get out there and start being the church if there was ever going to be something we could call church for the long haul. And in our text from Mark’s gospel today (not a third person reference here), we see that very thing.

Jesus sends them out in pairs to teach and heal. They were told to pack light and weren’t given any daily stipend. No steak dinners. No luxury hotels. No lights and fog or cool skinny jeans like trendy worship leaders were starting to wear. “You are the equipment,” Jesus said. Big gulp. They weren’t ready for this, right? We never are. Or we always are and we just don’t think we are. But they’re out there, preaching and teaching and listening to stories and sharing stories and anointing bodies and eating meals with people and healing those they could and it. was. awesome! But as so often is the case… when life is flying high and the spirit is soaring in powerful ways, something sweeps the leg. In this case, it’s the death of their spiritual partner John the Baptist. He’s beheaded on the silliest of whims and it had been the disciple’s job to retrieve the body of their friend and bury him. So they’ve had this marvelous success and now this grief and, as the text says, “The disciples gathered around Jesus and told him all the things they had experienced on their journey.”

They surely had some one-up stories. “Man, this one spirit we exorcised was epic.” “Yeah, well, Pete preached this one sermon that was the number one downloaded message of the week across the land and the whole community came to faith.” Another chimes in, “This one lady we met and sang for tried to pay us in meatballs. She was all, “Hold out your hands!” just like that lady in the Wedding Singer.” The bigger issue, Jesus knows, is how these guys will sustain their spiritual life without being all consumed by outward successes. If they lose touch with the Spirit, they’ve got nothing. It is why Jesus insists on them doing what Jesus regularly demonstrated himself, “Go on to that deserted place and feel your heart beat again.”

Solitude is the longing for God… to experience God in an unmediated way. We so often try to mediate this connection with our words or theological constructs or religious activity. Solitude, however, is really this deep longing to find ourselves… to be in touch with what is most real within us. But as Ruth Haley Barton writes in her book, “Sacred Rhythms[2],” this inspiration of this Lenten series,

“It’s tricky to get the soul to come out. We are not very safe for ourselves because our internal experience involves continual critique and judgment and our tender soul does not want to risk it. And so, we settle for a noisy spirituality which oftentimes is just an organized group of people crashing through the woods together, making so much noise that there’s not a soul in sight.”

When we go and go and go exhaustion sets in … especially when we are accessible all the time. When our phones never get left on the dresser in the bedroom so we can be present to the humans we do life with, everyone loses. Most of us are more tired than we know at the soul level. “We are teetering on the brink of dangerous exhaustion, and we really cannot do anything else until we have gotten some rest.” I had a colleague who was sharing with me about this struggle… Sabbath… a holy word we throw around but tend not to pay attention to… Sabbath being a holy day when we rest, break free from schedules and commitments and being the supposed boss of our lives to remember that we are not God and are not expected to be. Sabbath. My friend was saying how we think of rest or Sabbath as what happens when we’re exhausted… we collapse at the end of our break-neck-speed lives and call that collapse Sabbath. But Sabbath is actually to come first. We are to work from our rest not rest from our work. Do you sense the difference? The intentionality is different and, I’ll argue, that our productivity will be much better as well.

And I know what you’re thinking… “I don’t have time do nothing. I don’t have time for solitude. I am the god of my life and I ain’t got time to listen for some other God.” We may be resistant in this way… or we may be a little softer while still hesitant. “I see the value… I crave the solitude but is there really any hope for me? I’m overcommitted and too far gone.” My guess is your spirit is telling you it needs this. We’re an exhausted people. Several friends posted this meme this week:

I feel like I’m already tired tomorrow.

Does that resonate with you? You’ve got private pain and disillusionment that you’ve been trying to shore up with inspirational pep talks that sound like somebody else’s rhetoric more than God’s word to you. You’ve got heavy decisions looming and you’re exhausted to the point of not trusting your own judgment. Your ability to love and trust is wearing thin and you’re just simply on the brink of not being able to handle your life. What I want to say to you… if that’s what you’re feeling is this… “Don’t be torn down by such discouragement. See your restlessness as an invitation to do something different.” You need space to be with what is truly real in your life – to celebrate your joys, grieve the losses, shed the tears, sit with questions and feel your feelings. This “being with what is” is not the same as problem solving or fixing… it is being in that place and waiting for God to meet you there. We get so busy trying to make stuff happen rather than simply waiting on God to heal us from the inside out. It’s why Moses encourages the Israelites who have been backed into a corner by the Egyptians to hang in there. He says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” (Exodus 14:13-14). Could you start there?

Choose a place that feels comfortable and safe… a favorite chair, a favorite tree. Settle into a comfortable position in your body. Feel your heart beat. Breathe deeply. Sit patiently until you begin to notice what is most true about you these days. Don’t rush. Don’t try to make anything happen. Let your soul venture out to say something to you that perhaps you have had a hard time acknowledging. Sit with what comes to you and become conscious of God’s presence with you in that awareness. Don’t try to do anything with what you are knowing except be with it. In other words, as Ruth Barton says, “Don’t scare it away.” Feel the difference between trying to fix it and just being with it. Barton says, “Feel the difference between doing something with it and resting with it. Feel the difference between trying to fight it and letting God fight for you. What does it mean for you to be still and let God fight or work for you in this particular area?” Solitude. It may feel strange at first but stick with it… regularly… the biggest changes in our lives come from the smallest adjustments, compounded over time.

I was on retreat with the leadership team of the Bethany Fellows in Arizona early last month. It was such a powerful week in the desert. I admit that my soul was parched. The noise was consuming. I was holding a lot with you and for you… along with my own spiritual and life noise. I have been on this particular retreat five years running now… to the desert… a place I never imagined appreciating so much. But it took my fifth return to feel God’s presence in a way that I have never before. You’ve got to stick with this stuff, you know. This time, stepping out onto that desert soil, I almost verbalized out loud what I felt in my spirit: “This place knows my heart. This desert has held my prayers before.” One of our disciplines is to spend the best part of two days in solitude… we practice silence… cut out the distractions… get your spirit knotted tighter with God’s. On that second day, I climbed a familiar mountain and sat on this rock for a couple of hours. This was my view. I thought of you… named you in my spirit… held your pains that I knew of and celebrated your joys. I sat with myself in a way I hadn’t for a long time. It’s sort of a big reflective year in my household. My wife and I both turn forty. We’ll also celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. This will be our tenth year of living and serving among you. The church turns sixty in just a few short weeks. And I just sat with my soul… and allowed it to feel what I hadn’t made time to feel. It was hard and it was sweet. There were tears and there was healing. There was uncertainty and there was hope. Now I stayed on that mountain for a good while… honestly part of it was I realized it was going to be a lot harder to get down than it was climbing up. There was no path… it was reaching, stretching and climbing rocks. But I also felt so close to God. I came down the better for having made the climb.

Look… I get invited into a lot of stories… greatest privilege as a pastor is your trust to say, “This is my life… it’s hard… will you hold it with me.” Of course I will. I know your pains and your uncertainties and rejections and questions and breakdowns and breakthroughs. I know you’re wondering if “just sitting in the presence of God” can really make any difference in your life. And I know it may be the hardest discipline of all. But if we want to have any foundation upon which we can build our faith, we’ve got to come away to a deserted place, a park bench, a hallway in your home, and rest in the presence of God. Let that practice become the baseline to the song God is playing through your life. It will put you in the flow of the sacred rhythm and ground you in a way that nothing else can. Lent is an invitation to look at your life in a whole new way.

It was awesome last Thursday to have part of the Chebny crew come by the church to receive their ashes as they were out of town for our Ash Wednesday service. That’s extra mile discipleship. “Ash Thursday” they lovingly called it. Pastor Courtney received them and made the mark of the cross on their foreheads… even Canaan in full Spiderman garb. As they left, Giselle asked Canaan, “Can you tell me what the ashes mean?” “I have dirt all over me,” he said. His mom then asks, “and what does that have to do with Jesus?” Canaan says, “He washes the dirt off of me.”

‘Tis the season for deepening our practice, friends. You’ve got to want it… give the extra time. Hold your heart. Feel your lungs breathe. I can’t wait to see what new life will find its way in our lives as gift… gift… gift…

[1] From Rob Bell’s “How to be Here.” Harper Collins. 2016. The quotes of these two paragraphs come from this work.[2]Sacred Rhythms. Ruth Haley Barton. IVP Books. 2006. Her influence is evident in this message as well as in the formation of the entire series.

theme verse :: “Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51a)

Richard Rohr says, "A good journey begins with knowing where we are and being willing to go someplace else." The sacred season of Lent always affords us such an opportunity. What is your deepest spiritual desire? Do you long for more? The movement from desire to discipline is important. This forty-day journey to Easter invites us to be honest with God, and ourselves, about our sin and our hope, about our shortcomings and our holy longings. On Ash Wednesday, it begins with a cry for mercy and a commitment to follow Jesus on the way.

Mark 10: 46 – 52They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher,[a] let me see again.” 52 Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

“There are moments in our lives when we cry out [if even] inwardly, ‘I don’t care what anyone else says; there has to be more to the Christian life than this!’” Maybe you’ve been in such a space before. Maybe you’re in such a life space now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve grown up in the church, are new to the faith, or somewhere in between, we are all prone to such a pondering at some point. Ruth Haley Barton, who authored the book, Sacred Rhythms[1], which will supply important guidance to our series this Lent, admitted this very feeling even as she was pastoring a church. She called it CFS (Christian fatigue syndrome). The more she refused to acknowledge this longing for more, the deeper and wider the emptiness became. She said, “It nearly swallowed me whole.” It was a time when she couldn’t begin to fathom what Jesus meant when he said, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10). In that season of her life, she said, “I was cynical at best.” Do you understand this feeling?

Some of this has to do with our sense that we can manufacture spirituality. We can work at it, yes, and at some point, our desire for more must lead to our discipline for more or we’re not giving God our best effort toward that transformational reality. However, spiritual transformation is full of mystery. The Greek word for this process translates into metamorphosis in English, like a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly. It’s hard to imagine that the caterpillar has much cognitive understanding about the process or the end product of the whole thing. Caterpillars don’t sit around with their colleagues in the break room saying, “Thinking of cocooning this weekend. I’ve prayed it through. It’s time.” They don’t do that, right? But… there’s something in the deepest essence of that little squirmy creature that says, “It is time” and so the caterpillar obeys this deep inner urge to enter the transformative process. Giving ourselves over to our own spiritual transformation is just like this mystery. We find ourselves on the edge of something that we internally long for but something we cannot do for ourselves. We can only put ourselves in position… making ourselves available… and trusting God to work within us.

This is surely, in part, what has led you here tonight. Sure there’s the, “Well I’m singing in the choir,” or “The whole Youth Group had to come,” or you thought there would be snacks. I know there are always many factors that go into getting us to any place and any given time. But since you’re here, I have to believe that even some part of you is longing for more… longing to understand and to be understood… longing to be more even as you long to be accepted as you are… longing to find control over yourself even as all seems chaotic and out of control all around you. But you’re here in this sanctuary on this first day of the season of Lent so why not make the investment in your soul. Richard Rohr says, Lent is a sacred season that always affords us such an opportunity if we are willing. Where are you willing to go? Where are you willing to grow? What is your deepest spiritual desire? Do you long for more? The movement from desire to discipline is important and so tonight… in what may be the most straightforward and honest night of any church night, is a perfect place to own where we are and be willing to go someplace else.

Why is this night so honest? For starters, the mark of the cross in ash on our foreheads is the very humbling reminder of our mortality. We’re all going to die. The science around death still offers the research that the human mortality rate still hovers around 100%. They’re even teaching this in schools you know? I still remember my daughter coming home from school one day last year announcing, “It’s official! My classmates and I are going to live until we’re 127.” Perhaps… but even still, that 128th year is not promised. Death is real. We deny it. Ignore it. Or assume it’s for others. But it takes little to remind us that it looms near. Now, of course, there are stories of facing and defeating death that help build our sense that we can overcome death on our own. A man attacked by a mountain lion while on a run, wrestles and kills it with his bare hands. Death defied… at least for the runner. Two elementary aged sisters wander from home, get lost, and rely on their 4-H skills to survive for a couple of days in the wilderness. Amazing!

Or maybe you heard Jeremy Taylor’s survival story this week. An adventurer, Jeremy and his dog, Ally, love to explore the wild mountains of Oregon and ventured out on such an expedition a couple of weeks ago. Heavy snow set in and ultimately trapped he and Ally in their car without a phone or any way of finding freedom. For the next five days, this man and his dog survived by starting the car once in a while to supply a little heat and eating the only thing he found in his car that put any calories into their bodies at all. Wait for it? Taco Bell sauce packets. That’s it! Five days! Taylor said after being found and rescued by a snowmobiler, “Taco Bell fire sauce saves lives!” Thankfully, these stories all ended well but we know many more do not. And this man’s escape of death doesn’t give him a pass altogether. He’ll face death again. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.” Accepting our mortality is part of what this night is about. When the ash is placed on our foreheads in the shape of a cross later tonight, we’ll hear it said

It sets the tone for this season in a way only death can. Yes, at the end of all of this, we’ll celebrate Easter… the resurrection… life eternal… but how can we really appreciate it if we don’t recognize that death comes first. We often think of this spiritually as a death to self. Giving up our way for the way of transformation… like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon trusting that the remodel of its very being is worth the submission of self to the process. There’s got to be more, right? There’s got to be more. While this longing and desire is often bittersweet as it means there’s some hard work ahead, it also is the very thing that reminds us that we are alive in ways we truly and ultimately want to be alive. When was the last time you felt a longing for healing and fundamental change groaning within you? Do you know where you are? Do you know where your spirit is? Are you willing to go someplace else? That’s the question of this night. Very specifically the question is this: What do you want?

This is not a new or mysterious question, but it is a transformative one… one that Jesus asked of people often. “What do you want?” he would ask. “What do you want me to do for you?” This is the question asked in the scriptural passage you heard read just a bit ago. The story of Bartimaeus – Blind Bartimaeus as he was often called… which is rude but also a reality that he had struggled with presumably for a long time. We don’t know how long Bartimaeus spent begging by the side of the road, but it had clearly become something he was known for. We become known for the things we do as well which tragically begins to define us in ways God would never define us. Be careful about projecting such definitions onto others and even onto your own life. Bart heard the buzz that this Jesus would be passing by and he wants to see more than anything else – physically see of course but there is a greater spiritual depth to his desire as well. He wants the healing to cover his mind, body and spirit. He wants to be transformed.

It was a noisy and crowded day in the city and Jesus was such a popular teacher the crowds around him always made it tough for everyone to get close to him. To get his attention, Bartimaeus was going to have to dig deep. We live in a different time and place but we feel that same press. The crowds around us, the attachments to our phones, the noise in our heads even, are trying to push us out… keep us away from truly feeling our lives… and we have to dig deep, even on nights like tonight, to put ourselves out there and say, “This is important. I need this.” The moment comes and Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And as Jesus so often does throughout the biblical narrative, he hears the voice of the one who honestly cries out. He stops, finds his way to ensure that Bartimaeus stands in front of him, face to face. The need seems obvious, perhaps, but Jesus never assumes. He says, “What do you want me to do for you?” What is your desire? This is such a tender place to be. Bart has taken the big gulp and put himself out there this far. “I know you don’t know me all that well, Teacher, and I don’t know you that well either… but I’d really like to see again.”

If I asked you what you want… what would you say? We might start with a surface thing here or there. My son might say, a “G-wagon” or a “McLaren” or something like that. But when Jesus stands before you and asks, “What do you really want?” you know what he means… and you feel what he means too. Ruth Haley Barton says,

“Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You might think that your woundedness or your sinfulness is the truest thing about you or that your giftedness or your personality type or your job title or your identity as husband or wife, mother or father, somehow defines you. But in reality, it is your desire for God and your capacity to reach for more of God than you have right now that is the deepest essence of who you are.”

How bad do you want it? Desire, at some point, must give way to discipline for any transformation to be realized.

I was running through my neighborhood Monday night… it was freezing outside… but I’m trying to run a bit again and you’ve got to dig deep against everything else pressing in your life, or in your own body, that’s saying, “Nah. Not tonight. You’re good. Take the night off.” So I’m running. Slow and shivering… but I’m doing it. As I’m heading into one of the many cul-de-sacs in the neighborhood, I see a couple of garbage cans out in the middle of the street and a man standing in front of a car near those same garbage cans. “What in the world?” I thought to myself. And the man is now standing in front of the car, not facing the car but facing the same direction the car is facing, and he has his arms out in front of him like he’s pretend driving… sort of like a kid who spreads his arms pretending to fly like Superman. Now I’m slow, remember, and we’re on a cul-de-sac so I’m getting to watch this for a good little while without obviously having to stop and stare in astonishment of what was going on. The man’s intensity is growing… and his frustration… and it’s freezing outside! What I begin to realize is that this is surely the man’s teenage daughter in the car and she’s going to try to parallel park this beast between those two garbage cans. And no matter how hard the dad shows the motions and is pretending to drive from outside of the car, she’s got to try to land this boat between the cans on her own – which dad did not space too generously in my opinion. And sure enough, just as I turn the corner to make my way on down the road, “Bam!” She takes the back garbage can out hard and dad has his hands now on the back of his head. I wanted to circle back around… this was getting good. But I pressed on. I wondered if he set the garbage can back up to try again. I wondered how long they kept after it. She wanted to pass that drivers test I’m sure. And dad surely had his own motivations. How bad do you want it? This spiritual quest that we share… this hope that something will click… that the depths of our souls will be moved and transformed and more in touch with God… is something that we must desire enough to arrange our life around. Barton makes clear that such desire is a catalytic element of the spiritual life. If you’ve been waiting for someone to flat out ask you, “What is it you want?” then consider tonight that ask.

Bartimaeus faces every past moment of his life in that present moment face-to-face with Jesus. “Bart, what do you want me to do for you?” “I want to see.” And he sees with his eyes what he saw first in his spirit… Jesus. And the text says next, “Bartimaeus followed him on the way.” That moment changed everything. Yes, it was not a one-time commitment. Bart had new challenges now that his life was different. Seeing brought about opportunities and challenges that he didn’t have before. And what seemingly saved his life didn’t mean he wouldn’t struggle again. Like Jeremy Taylor who survived a week on Taco Bell fire sauce and Lazarus who Jesus resurrected from the dead, Bartimaeus was still mortal and would face death again. Your first commitment or your renewed commitment tonight will be met with a new challenge each day to your resolve and desire to want it still and want it more. It is a constant yielding of self to God and an acknowledgment we will mark tonight that must be acknowledged again and again. And yielding is trickier than you think.

About 6:45 every school day morning, I drive my daughter to school. And I’m not the only one. Other people, I have learned, do this too… drive their kids to school. So many do, in fact, that traffic is always a problem… especially as the main bridge across the river to the school is down to one lane of traffic either way… lots of yielding. Additionally, I count nine intersections for which I must negotiate who’s turn it is to yield… and to get back home my math says that’s eighteen separate opportunities to yield every morning of my life. But you know what happens with this yielding stuff, right? We stop. And then the motion game starts. You give that little wave, “You go. Go ahead.” And you inch a bit and they inch a bit and motion back the universal, “It’s okay. You go. Go ahead.” And we both wait… but we wait just long enough to decide we’ll go which only and always happens at the exact same time they’ve also decided that you are yielding to them and they’ll go ahead. So then you both stop again and instead of just going on, I start back with the nod and hand motion, “You go.” And after 18 intersections every morning to and from school, I’m about done with yielding you know? And with all of this time I’ve been giving to my own mortality thinking about tonight, I’m sort of like, “Forget all of this polite yielding nonsense. I’m going to go sometime… maybe it’s just my time.” And I’m inclined to just plow right through. But the discipline of yielding to God must start with our desire and follow with our discipline.

You up for it? The season of Lent is about yielding to Christ and putting in the focused effort. It starts with recognizing our mortality in our quest to discover life that is truly life. If you’re in that place of searching for something more… may you know this night is for you. “A good journey begins with knowing where we are and being willing to go someplace else.” The path is set to get in touch with the sacred rhythm the season affords. Will you go with us? Tonight, we cry for mercy. Then, like Bartimaeus, we follow Jesus on the way to transformation.

[1]Sacred Rhythms. Ruth Haley Barton. IVP Books. 2006. Her influence is evident in this message as well as in the formation of the entire series.